Increasing the memory performance of flash memory devices by writing sectors simultaneously to multiple flash memory devices

Abstract

In one embodiment of the present invention, a memory storage system for storing information organized in sectors within a nonvolatile memory bank is disclosed. The memory bank is defined by sector storage locations spanning across one or more rows of a nonvolatile memory device, each the sector including a user data portion and an overhead portion. The sectors being organized into blocks with each sector identified by a host provided logical block address (LBA). Each block is identified by a modified LBA derived from the host-provided LBA and said virtual PBA, said host-provided LBA being received by the storage device from the host for identifying a sector of information to be accessed, the actual PBA developed by said storage device for identifying a free location within said memory bank wherein said accessed sector is to be stored. The storage system includes a memory controller coupled to the host; and a nonvolatile memory bank coupled to the memory controller via a memory bus, the memory bank being included in a non-volatile semiconductor memory unit, the memory bank has storage blocks each of which includes a first row-portion located in said memory unit, and a corresponding second row-portion located in each of the memory unit, each of the memory row-portions provides storage space for two of said sectors, wherein the speed of performing write operations is increased by writing sector information to the memory unit simultaneously.