Love/Hate Relationship between Flash

Memory and Microdrive for Low-Power

Portable Storage

2004. 09. 26
Sang Lyul Min
Seoul National University
&
Samsung Electronics

Agenda
„ Overview of Portable Storage Technologies
„ Techniques for High Performance
„ Techniques for Low Power
„ Conclusions

1
 Portable Storage Applications

Source: http://www.samsung.com/AboutSAMSUNG/InvestorRelations/ IREvents/downloads/2003_samsungforum.pdf

The Contenders for Portable Storage Market

Flash Drive Micro Drive

IBM Hitachi
Samsung
Toshiba

Hitachi Seagate
Portable Storage

SanDisk
LexarMedia

2
Cost Comparison
$399.95 (2004.8)

$299.88 (2004.8)

$259.88 (2004.8)

Source: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/technolo/overview/chart03.html
5

NAND Flash Memory Basics

2j blocks

Data Spare Data Spare Data Spare

Data Spare Data Spare Data Spare
Data Spare Data Spare Data Spare

2i ………
pages … … …

Data Spare Data Spare Data Spare

„ Read physical page „ Erase block

„ (chip #, block #, page #) „ (chip#, block #)

„ ~ 25 us „ ~ 2 ms

„ Write physical page

„ (chip #, block #, page #)

„ ~ 300 us

3
FTL (Flash Translation Layer)
„ Definition
„ Software layer that makes flash memory appear to the system like
a disk drive

„ Challenges in FTL
„ Asymmetry in read and write speeds

„ No overwrite is allowed without erasing

Logical interface for a disk drive

512B 512B … 512B

0 1 N -1

„ Operations
1. Identify drive(): returns N
2. Read sectors(start sector #, # of sectors)
3. Write sectors(start sector #, # of sectors)

4
Block level mapping
„ Logical blocks
0 1 N -1

Sectors …

256 sectors

Logical … … …
blocks
0 N / 256

Block level mapping

„ Logical to physical block mapping
Logical blocks

Visible (data blocks) Invisible

… … … … … …
0 1 L Block mapping table
(map block)

… … … …

Physical blocks
10

5
Read procedure
„ Ex. read 3 sectors from 255
Logical blocks

… … … … … …
0 1 L Block mapping table
(map block)

… … … R R R …

Physical blocks

11

Write procedure (Data block update)

„ Ex. write 3 sectors from 255
… … … … … …
0 1 L Block mapping table
(map block)

… … … …

… W W W … …
Write buffer blocks

Still,
3.update
2.
1. Write
Erase ofdata
mapping
Fill remaining
write information
pages
buffer
datablocks
pagesis needed
for data

12

6
Write procedure (Map block update)
„ Ex. write 3 sectors from 255
… … … … … …
0 1 L Block mapping table
(map block)

… … … …

… W W W … W …
Write buffer blocks

Still, somewhere we need to keep the addresses of

6.new
4.
5. Fillmap
Erase remaining
Read-modify-write
write mapblocks
buffer pagespage
map for map
and write buffer blocks (i.e., logging)

13

Inside Hard Disk Drive

CPU
SRAM/DRAM
core
System Bus

USB, PCMCIA, SATA

Host
Interface Platters

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7
Host Interface Performance
Transfer Rate (MB/s)
800 SAS6Gbps

700
S-ATA3
600

500
IEEE
SAS3Gbps 1394b
400
Ultra320 SCSI
S-ATA2
300
IEEE
1394b
200 Ultra160 SCSI S-ATA1
IEEE
IEEEUltra Ultra2 SCSI 1394b
100 U-ATA66
USB 2.0
1394a
SCSI U-ATA33
SCSI-1 SCSI-2 SCSI-3 ATA2
ATA1 USB 1.1
0
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ATA SCSI SERIAL

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HDD Form Factor and Capacity

Source: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/technolo/overview/chart01.html
16

8
HDD Internal Data Rate

Source: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/technolo/overview/chart16.html
17

Inside Flash Drive

CPU
SRAM
core
System Bus

Flash Bus
Host Flash
Interface Interface
USB, PCMCIA, SATA

Flash Chips

18

9
Flash Chip Bandwidth
„ Write bandwidth = 2KB/300us = 6.7MB/s per chip
„ Read bandwidth = 2KB/25us = 80MB/s per chip
„ Erase bandwidth = 128KB/2ms = 64MB/s per chip

19

Flash bus bandwidth picture

20~33Mb/s per Pin

Flash

Source: Terry Lee, Micron Technology, Inc, VTF (VIA Technology Forum) 2003

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10
 21

Agenda
„ Overview of Portable Storage Technologies
„ Techniques for High Performance
„ Techniques for Low Power
„ Conclusions

22

11
 Techniques for High Performance
Flash Drive

CPU
SRAM
core
System Bus

High speed Flash bus

Flash Bus
Host Flash
Interface Interface
USB, PCMCIA, etc
“Sleeping with the enemy” “Getting out of the way”

Flash Chips
Multiple logical
chips in a single
packaging
(multi-banking)

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Techniques for High Performance HDD

Source: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/technolo/overview/chart19.html
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Agenda
„ Overview of Mobile Storage Technologies
„ Techniques for High Performance
„ Techniques for Low Power
„ Conclusions

25

Literature on Power Modeling of

Portable Storage
„ IBM Corporation. Adaptive Power Management for Mobile Hard
Drives. Technical Report, Storage Systems Division, IBM Corporation,
April 1999. Available at:
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/almaden/pbwhitepaper.pdf.
„ John Zedlewski, Sumeet Sobti, Nitin Garg, Fengzhou Zheng, Arvind
Krishnamurthy, and Randolph Wang. Modeling Hard-Disk Power
Consumption. Proc. Second Conference on File and Storage
Technologies. March 2003.
„ Fengzhou Zheng, Nitin Garg, Sumeet Sobti, Chi Zhang, Russell E.
Joseph, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Randolph Y. Wang. Considering
the Energy Consumption of Mobile Storage Alternatives. IEEE
Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer
Systems. October 2003.

26

13
The Love Part: HDD+Flash Combo

HDD with
reduced
+ = power consumption
and start-up time

HDD NAND Flash

27

Why HDD+Flash Combo?

1. Power consumption aspects:
„ In a laptop PC, HDD consumes
„ ~10% (~2W) total power when disk platters are spinning
„ ~1% (~0.2W) total power when disk platters are idle
2. Cost aspects:
„ 128MB Flash write buffer
„ < $8 in 2006
„ < $4 in 2008
3. Reliability aspects:
4. Performance aspects:

Source: Clark Nicholson, “Improved Disk Drive Power Consumption Using Solid State Non-Volatile Memory”, WinHEC2004.

28

14
HDD+Flash Combo Block Diagram

CPU
SRAM
core
System Bus

Flash Bus
Host Flash
Interface Interface
SATA
Flash Chip

Platters

29

Key Benefits of HDD+Flash Combo

„ 87% reduction in power can be achieved (1.75W)
„ Assumptions
„ Pavg active = ~2W (measured)

„ Pavg with Flash write buffer and “Longhorn” kernel = 0.25W (calculated)
„ Toff = 600s @ .18W
„ Ton = 18s @ 2.5W
„ Ton = spin up time (5s) + Flash buffer flush time (13s)

„ Flash buffer size = 128MB

„ Transfer rate = 10MB/s

Source: Clark Nicholson, “Improved Disk Drive Power Consumption Using Solid State Non-Volatile Memory”, WinHEC2004.

30

15
Key Considerations
1. Correctness: should preserve the semantics of HDD
2. Fault tolerance and graceful degradation: should operate
correctly despite partial/total failure in flash memory
3. Power efficiency: should reduce the power consumption
as much as possible
4. Reliability: should improve the reliability as much as
possible
5. Performance: should improve the user-perceived
performance as much as possible

31

Agenda
„ Overview of Poratble Storage Technologies
„ Techniques for High Performance
„ Techniques for Low Power
„ Conclusions

32

16
Conclusions
„ In the animal world
„ Survival of the fittest

„ In the memory world

„ Survival of the fastest or cheapest

?
Volatile Non-volatile
Fastest SRAM FRAM?
Cheapest DRAM NAND Flash
HDD

33

Conclusions
„ From the history

IBM 360/85 IBM 360/91

Clock Rate 80 ns 60 ns

Memory Speed 1040 ns 750 ns

Memory Interleaving 4 way 8 way

Register Renaming,
Additional Features Cache Memory Out-of-order Execution,
etc

But, IBM 360/85 faster on 8 of 11 programs!

Source: David Patterson, et al., “A Case for Intelligent DRAM: IRAM”, Hot Chips VIII, August, 1996

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17
The Ultimate Limit – Micro Drive

Fly 2,000,000 Miles Per Hour

By
Night
Boeing 747

1/100” Flying Height

Source: Richard Lary, The New Storage Landscape: Forces Source:

shaping the storage economy, 2003. http://www.hitachigst.com/

35

The Ultimate Limit – Flash Drive

B/L Direction

200nm

W/L Direction

Source: K. Kim et al. IEDM Tech. Dig., 2002, pp. 919-922

36

18
Announcement
„ IWSSPS 2005: International Workshop on Software
Support for Portable Storage
„ Date: March 6, 2005
„ Place: San Francisco, USA (along with IEEE RTAS 2005
and Embedded System Conference 2005)
„ Important Dates:
„ Paper Submission: December 15th 2004
„ Notification of Acceptance: January 15th 2005
„ Camera-ready due: February 15th 2005

37

„ Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- File system for portable storage
- Interaction between file system and portable storage
- FTL (Flash Translation Layer) for Flash memory
- Power management for HDD including microdrives
- DRM (Digital Right Management) for portable storage
- Distributed mobile storage
- Software reliability for portable storage
- Software fault tolerance techniques for portable storage

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