How and Why does Mobile I/O Stack Inflate Writes?

This study provides a deep analysis of the write inflation problem in mobile I/O stack, which concerns the lifetime of flash-based mobile storage. We identified that write inflation is closely related to data duplication: File systems and embedded databases introduce behavior data duplication for transaction management and space re-organization. The block interface creates sub-block data duplication by writing coarse-grain blocks for tiny updates. Applications and embedded databases repeatedly write zero blocks for file scrubbing. Based on our analysis, we advocate to reconfigure and redesign the current mobile I/O stack for write conserving.