Tadd wrote:
No, I don't think this is how it works. You are right about "wear leveling", but what you are describing is exactly the opposite, right? Very "not-level" wearing, all in one place. It doesn't work like that, the SSD will relocate blocks to ensure that the flash is worn evenly, thus "wear leveling".
My understanding is that there are two types of wear leveling, dynamic and static. Dynamic leaves blocks that are only read from alone and doesn't move them. Static moves all blocks around to even wear to all blocks. Here's an excerpt from this webpage: http://thessdguy.com/how-controllers-maximize-ssd-life-better-wear-leveling/
"There are two fundamental categories of wear leveling: Static and Dynamic. With dynamic wear leveling only two kinds of blocks participate in the wear leveling algorithm: those that undergo change, and those that are unused. Blocks of data that don’t change (“Static” blocks) are left alone by a dynamic write leveling algorithm.
Static wear leveling manages write leveling across all of the flash in the system – the changed blocks, the unused blocks, and the static blocks. This means that a static block that contains valid data but that is never being written to will still be moved around within the flash in order to allow all blocks to receive the same amount of wear. It’s easy to understand why this would help, since those blocks would otherwise be unavailable to the wear leveling algorithm. On the other hand, if you’re trying to minimize write/erase cycles, it’s unintuitive that this approach is the better of the two."
According to wikipedia, dynamic wear leveling is used in consumer grade flash drives and is faster. Static is used in industrial grade flash drives and is slower. Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling
My understanding anyway.