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Wear Leveling - Simplest Way to Increase SSD Life

Posted by Samuel Nakhimovsky on Thursday, 06 Feb 2014

The most concerning question lingering with most SSD customer is how long with the Flash drive last. Even Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) which have been used in ubiquitous computing applications for over 50 years and went through many generations of technical improvements are well known for frequent errors and even catastrophic failures. SSDs which are appreciated by the Industrial Application market segment for it's superior environmental and temperature specifications are also expected to offer greater reliability and useful life expectancy.

The major drawback that all Flash based storage solutions inherently possess is a limited number of write cycles that can be performed on any specific memory sector. This limit is uniquely specified in the data sheet for each memory component. Ranging from 3Kcycles for an MLC NAND Flash to 100Kcycles for an SLC NAND Flash, this finite threshold is a stated limit of the component's ability to perform as expected.

To overcome the component technical limitation, the Flash Controller developers have devised various system level solutions to improve the overall usage and life expectancy of the whole drive. A major part of this improvement solution is a Wear Leveling algorithm that spreads the uneven usage of specific memory block across the full memory address space.

The two most common Wear Leveling algorithms are Dynamic and Static which relate to the two types of data typically stored in an SSD. A more robust Flash controllers offer both Static and Dynamic Wear Leveling algorithm integrated as part of the Flash Controller firmware.

Efficiency of Dynamic vs. Static Wear Level

Please contact Fortasa to discuss your reliability requirements of your Solid State Storage products.