Flash aging prevention technique (FAP) for flash based Solid State Disks

Solid State Disks (SSDs) are replacing hard disks due to enhancement in speed and reduction in size, power and cost. It is an obvious choice for many applications including personal computers, embedded systems, medical and healthcare devices etc. However, a lot of enhancement and research is required in order to make it reliable. SSD uses Flash technology which is a fast, efficient nonvolatile storage chip and offers cost-effective solution for SSDs. However, the feature of erase before write leads flash towards wearing out therefore affecting the life of flash. Many wearleveling policies were proposed in past to extend SSD life time by ensuring even wearleveling of the blocks in a flash memory. Several algorithms have been proposed to improve wearleveling of SSD including Hot-Cold Swapping, Dual pool Algorithm (DP), Kim and Lee algorithm (KL), Block aging prevention technique (BAP) and Cost Age and Times Algorithm (CAT) but these policies were for single flash memory. This paper disuses a multiple flash wear leveling policy known as flash aging prevention technique for flash memory array(FMA). This policy reduces the variance in erasure count of multiple flash memories by 24 % compared to DP, CAT and BAP.