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Solid-state storage devices and the block layerSolid-state storage devices and the block layerPosted Oct 9, 2010 15:03 UTC (Sat) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246)In reply to: Solid-state storage devices and the block layer by joern Parent article: Solid-state storage devices and the block layer
Note: I'm not an expert. Please do not mistake me for one. :-) Here are my observations, though, along with things I've read elsewhere. Flash requires wear leveling in order to maximize its life. For the greatest effect, you want to wear level across the entire device, which means picking up and moving otherwise quiescent data so that each sector sees approximately the same number of erasures. That's one aspect. Another aspect is that erase blocks are generally much larger than write sectors. So, when you do erase, you end up erasing quite a lot. Furthermore erasure is about an order of magnitude slower than writing, and writing is about an order of magnitude slower than reading. For a random flash device whose data sheet I just pulled up, a random read takes 25us, page program takes 300us, and block erase takes 2ms. Pages are 2K bytes, whereas erase blocks are 128K bytes. (Warning: This is where I get speculative!) And finally, if you have multiple flash devices (or multiple independent zones on the same flash device), you can take advantage of that fact and the fact that "seeks are free" by redirecting writes to idle flash units if others are busy. That's probably the most interesting area to explore algorithmically, IMO. Given that an erase operation can take a device out of commission for 2ms, picking which device to start an erase operation on and when to do it can have a pretty big impact on performance. If you can do background erase on idle devices, for example, then you can hide the cost.
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