Capacity-independent address mapping for flash storage devices with explosively growing capacity

Address mapping for flash storage devices has been a challenging design issue for controllers because of rapidly growing device capacity. In contrast with existing mapping methods, this study proposes a capacity-independent address mapping method to decouple the required on-device RAM space from the capacity of a flash storage device. Especially, the required RAM size of the proposed method depends only on the user accessed data set, which is also referred to as the working set, while the page-level performance can be nearly achieved. In addition, a simple but practical wear-leveling design is proposed with the capability in lifetime estimation of flash storage devices. Experiments of the proposed scheme obtained encouraging results.