BPAC: An adaptive write buffer management scheme for flash-based Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives (SSD's) have shown promise to be a candidate to replace traditional hard disk drives, but due to certain physical characteristics of NAND flash, there are some challenging areas of improvement and further research. We focus on the layout and management of the small amount of RAM that serves as a cache between the SSD and the system that uses it. Of the techniques that have previously been proposed to manage this cache, we identify several sources of inefficient cache space management due to the way pages are clustered in blocks and the limited replacement policy. We develop a hybrid page/block architecture along with an advanced replacement policy, called BPAC, or Block-Page Adaptive Cache, to exploit both temporal and spatial locality. Our technique involves adaptively partitioning the SSD on-disk cache to separately hold pages with high temporal locality in a page list and clusters of pages with low temporal but high spatial locality in a block list. We run trace-driven simulations to verify our design and find that it outperforms other popular flash-aware cache schemes under different workloads.