Data management in flash memory

摘要

A method is disclosed for emulating a disk drive on flash memory, thus enabling one or more file-systems to be resident on flash memory. A list of data structures is maintained corresponding to certain sectors resident on flash memory. Certain characteristics of data access to those sectors are recorded and a weightage value is dynamically computed, which is used to select those sectors that remain cached. This weightage value is calculated so that it minimizes erases and speeds up writes to flash memory and also automatically detects flash memory sectors that hold critical meta-data information or frequently accessed files and gives preferential treatment to those sectors. The number of sector caches available to the device driver is configured depending on the memory available in the system.