Rethinking I/O request management over eMMC-based solid-state drives

Due to its popularity and competitive prices, the embedded multimedia card (eMMC) has become a popular choice to replace raw flash chips in the design of solid-state drives (SSDs). However, an eMMC-based SSD often encounters its worst-case performance on random accesses. To address such a performance problem, this paper proposes an eMMC-aware strategy to exploit the characteristics of eMMC and access features of file systems, so as to effectively separate hot/cold data and repack data of I/O requests to improve the write performance of eMMC-based SSDs. According to the experiment results obtained, the proposed strategy can significantly improve random write performance, compared to prior works.