Flash Translation Layer and its functionalities

Flash memory had gained popularity as secondary storage when compared to hard disk it poses excellent factors like as light weighted, shock resistance, non volatility in nature and low power consumption. However there are some technical limitations such as read and write operation cost differs in context of energy and time. To write any data, first that page should be erased which leads to another level of complexity as read/write operation works on granularity of page and erase operation is performed on granularity of block which is collection of pages. Despite the fact that flash memory is replacing traditional hard disk it urge some computational overhead which make this replacement difficult. To sort out the differences in interface an emulation layer FTL (Flash Translation Layer) is used. FTL mapped the host generated logical address to physical address of flash memory. This paper surveys the functionalities of FTL.