Joint management of RAM and flash memory with access pattern considerations

The popularity of flash memory has triggered the emerging of various products with flash memory as storage medium. More advanced architectures with better hardware resources are now explored by vendors to fit different market needs. Different from the past work, this paper proposes to consider RAM as a storage medium together with flash memory to take advantage of the characteristics of both RAM and flash memory. In particular, an adaptive management strategy is proposed with the considerations of access patterns to improve both the system performance and the system endurance. The capability of the proposed approach is evaluated by a series of experiments, for which we have very encouraging results¹.