Authors: 

Yun-Sheng Chang, Yao Hsiao, Tzu-Chi Lin, Che-Wei Tsao, Chun-Feng Wu, Yuan-Hao Chang, Hsiang-Shang Ko, and Yu-Fang Chen, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, *

Abstract: 

This paper introduces the design of a snapshot-consistent flash translation layer (SCFTL) for flash disks, which has a stronger guarantee about the possible behavior after a crash than conventional designs. More specifically, the flush operation of SCFTL also has the functionality of making a “disk snapshot.” When a crash occurs, the flash disk is guaranteed to recover to the state right before the last flush. The major benefit of SCFTL is that it allows a more efficient design of upper layers in the storage stack. For example, the file system built on SCFTL does not require the use of a journal for crash recovery. Instead, it only needs to perform a flush operation of SCFTL at the end of each atomic transaction. We use a