Hierarchy of major buffers The Effects on Read Performance from the Addition of a Long Term Read Buffer to YAFFS2

My research project examined the effects on read performance from the addition of a long term read buffer to YAFFS2. YAFFS (Yet Another Flash Filing System) is a file system, the program that organizes data on a storage device (like a hard drive), that is specialized for flash memory. Flash memory is a type of storage device that is typically found in embedded devices, like cell phones or PDA's; USB “thumb drives” also contain flash memory. Hard drives and flash memory have several key differences. Flash memory is smaller and uses less power than a hard drive, making it a popular choice for systems that run off a battery and must conserve power usage. Data on a storage device is organized into pieces called sectors or pages. This is done to allow data to be changed without having to modify everything on the drive. Hard drives have much smaller sectors than flash memory, which does give them a slight advantage in performance. While the data on a hard drive can be changed many times without causing physical wear on the drive, the data on a flash memory device can only be changed a certain amount of times (often over 500,000 times per page,