Flash storage failure rate reduction and hyperscale infrastructure robustness enhancement through the MRAM-NOR flash based cache architecture

摘要

Embodiments of the present invention provide flash-based storage with non-volatile memory components. MRAM is mainly used as a data buffer, and NOR flash is used to store metadata, such as FTL information, thereby providing non-volatile storage and significantly simplifying power failure mitigation. MRAM and NOR are jointly used to share the work performed by DRAM in existing SSDs based on the characteristics of the data stored, reducing the power consumption and cost of the SSD. The cache fault rate is reduced because both MRAM and NOR are immune from soft errors. Moreover, the working mechanisms are simplified and the power-up duration is significantly reduced because less data is copied from NAND flash, as there is no need to move all of the FTL information back to NAND flash at power off.