HDFTL: An On-Demand Flash Translation Layer Algorithm for Hybrid Solid State Drives

NAND flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) have been widely used in consumer electronic products such as smartphones, digital video recorders, and laptops. The flash translation layer (FTL) is crucial to the performance of SSDs. In this article, an on-demand FTL, briefly as HDFTL, is proposed for hybrid SSDs built with SLC+MLC flash memory. HDFTL divides the SLC into data blocks and translation blocks and uses all MLC as data blocks. All mapping items are stored in the translation block of the SLC, and partial mapping items are loaded into the cached mapping table of the FTL as needed. The contributions of HDFTL are as follows: (1) Unify the address mapping method of SLC and MLC areas to simplify the FTL design of hybrid SSDs; (2) Split the cached mapping table into a hot-write mapping table and a normal mapping table and use time locality to solve hot-write identification problem in hybrid SSDs; (3) According to the relative wear rate of SLC and MLC areas, adaptively adjust the size of the hot-write mapping table and the normal mapping table. Experimental results show that the performance of HDFTL is better than that of the existing FTLs for hybrid SSDs.