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.