1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to managing a flash memory and data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Flash memories have low power consumption, and are nonvolatile and stable. Also, manufacturing costs of the flash memories are continuously decreasing according to the development of manufacturing processes, and thus flash memories have become widely used.
A disc storage medium can perform an overwrite operation, where new data is overwritten on previous data, so as to update data, but such an in-place update is not possible in a flash memory. Accordingly, in order to update data stored in a flash memory, new data is stored after deleting previously stored data.
Also, a physical address where data is actually stored in a flash memory may not correspond with a logical address related to processing and operating data. Accordingly, software that maps the physical and logical addresses and controls data input/output is required in order to smoothly relay data between a host and the flash memory.