Storage Controller Sudden Power-Off Recovery Zone Performance
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Solution Overview
Problem
Storage devices face performance degradation due to sudden power-offs during writing operations, which can lead to data integrity issues and reduced zone performance.
Innovation Solution
The storage device includes a controller that detects sudden power-offs during writing operations and writes dummy data to the target zone during recovery. After restoring power, the controller writes data of matching size to a memory block outside the target zone, generating mapping information to maintain data accessibility.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If dummy data is written to the target zone during recovery operation after sudden power-off, then data integrity is improved, but zone performance degrades due to data mismatch
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the dummy data that causes performance degradation by writing it to a memory block outside the target zone rather than keeping it in the target zone. This removes the harmful element (dummy data mismatch) while preserving the beneficial effect (data integrity recovery) by maintaining the dummy data somewhere in the memory system for potential future use.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary mechanism - a mapping table - that mediates between the dummy data and the host system. The mapping table stores the relationship between the original target zone and the actual location of dummy data, allowing the host to access data correctly while the dummy data resides in a different physical location, thus resolving the performance issue.
2Productivity
If data is written to memory blocks outside target zone to match dummy data size, then zone performance is maintained, but device complexity increases due to mapping management
Solution Approach 1:
The mapping table serves as an intermediary data structure that manages the relationship between logical zone addresses and physical memory block locations. This intermediary layer handles the complexity of tracking where dummy data and actual data are stored, allowing the system to maintain simple zone interfaces while managing complex data placement internally.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback mechanisms through the mapping table that tracks the location and status of data in memory blocks. This feedback allows the controller to make informed decisions about data placement, recovery operations, and zone management, maintaining performance while managing complexity through systematic tracking.
Data Source
AI summary
A storage device may set a plurality of zones each of which includes one or more memory blocks among a plurality of memory blocks. When a sudden power-off is detected during a write operation for a target zone among the plurality of zones, the storage device may write dummy data to the target zone during a recovery operation for the sudden power-off. When writing data of a size matching that of the dummy data onto the target zone after the dummy data is written, the storage device may write the data to a target memory block in which is outside the target zone.