High-performance NAND and PRAM hybrid storage design for consumer electronics

Recently PRAM (Phase-change RAM) is emerging as a promising next generation non-volatile memory device, because it supports fast byte-level access capability and in-place update (no erase-before-program constraint) unlike traditional NAND Flash. Although this PRAM technology is not matured yet, in terms of capacity and write performance, we expect that using this PRAM with traditional NAND Flash enables us to design high-performance and low cost storage for consumer electronics. So in this paper, we introduce a PRAM and NAND hybrid storage design as a practical approach. To this end, we first define a hybrid storage architecture, and then design a hybrid FTL (Flash Translation Layer) and a hybrid FAT filesystem. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed hybrid storage solution enhances the storage performance 6 times faster and lifetime 6.4 times longer, on the average.