Logical-to-physical address translation for solid state disks

An apparatus for transferring data between one or more sectors of a storage device and at least one external device via a communication link, the sectors of the storage device organized into blocks and superblocks, the apparatus comprising:

• a host layer module adapted to send data to, and receive data from, the communication link, wherein data requests are received from the at least one external device, and wherein the data requests comprise i) a starting logical sector address and ii) a span of sectors to be transferred;
• a buffer for storing data to be transferred to or from the storage device;
• a buffer layer module for i) managing the buffer and ii) allocating storage space in the buffer corresponding to the span of sectors to be transferred;
• at least one active block table corresponding to each superblock, the active block table for storing one or more page offsets of an active block in the corresponding superblock;
• at least one summary page for storing mapping data corresponding to each superblock, wherein the mapping data maps a physical address in the storage device to a logical sector address, the mapping data comprising:
• i) a page index, ii) a block index, and iii) a superblock number;
• a page global directory for storing a block index and a page index of the at least one summary page and an address of the at least active block table for each superblock of the storage device;
• a flash translation layer module for i) identifying for the data request, based on the starting logical sector address, the corresponding page index, block index, and superblock number, ii) maintaining the data stored in the page global directory, the active block tables, and the summary pages, and iii) iteratively identifying physical addresses for sectors in the span of sectors based on i) the active block table of the superblock, if the physical address is in the active block of the superblock, otherwise, ii) the summary page of the superblock, based on the block index and page index.