Performance Analysis of Flash Translation Layer Algorithms for Windows-based Flash Memory Storage Device

Flash memory is widely used as a storage device for potable equipments such as digital cameras, MP3 players and cellular phones because of its characteristics such as its large volume and nonvolatile feature, low power consumption, and good performance. However, a block in flash memories should be erased to write because of its hardware characteristic which is called as erase-before-write architecture. The erase operation is much slower than read or write operations. FTL is used to overcome this problem. We compared the performance of the existing FTL algorithms on Windows-based OS. We have developed a tool called FTL APAT in order to gather I/O patterns of the disk and analyze the performance of the FTL algorithms. It is the log buffer scheme with full associative sector translation(FAST) that the performance is best.