Access pattern reshaping for eMMC-enabled SSDs

The growing popularity of embedded Multi-Media Controllers (eMMCs) presents a unique opportunity to design commodity grade solid-state drives products. This work addresses the essential design issues of such drives and introduces a light-weight FTL design. In particular, access patterns to an eMMC-enabled solid-state drive are reshaped to create sequential access patterns and specific write sizes to better accommodate the characteristics of eMMCs, without resorting to the conventional address translation FTL design. At the same time, garbage collection overheads are minimized with reliability considerations, since eMMCs are usually not equipped with a powerful controller of a sophisticated design. The capability of the proposed design is evaluated by a series of experiments, for which we have very encouraging results.