FAB: Flash-Aware Buffer Management Policy for Portable Media Players

This paper presents a novel buffer management scheme for portable media players equipped with flash memory. Though flash memory has various advantages over magnetic disks such as small and lightweight form factor, solid-state reliability, low power consumption, and shock resistance, its physical characteristics imposes several limitations. Most notably, it takes relatively long time to write data in flash memory and the data cannot be overwritten before being erased first. Since an erase operation is performed as a unit of larger block, the employed strategy for mapping logical blocks onto physical pages affects real performance of flash memory. This article suggests a flash-aware buffer management scheme that reduces the number of erase operations by selecting a victim based on its page utilization rather than based on the traditional LRU policy. Our scheme effectively minimizes the number of write and erase operations in flash memory, reducing the total execution time by 17% compared to the LRU policy.