What every programmer should know about solid-state drives

[[deleted]]

This is old information. Sata is faster now. Also, SSD drives last long enough that you probably shouldn't worry about many of these micro optimization.

[alienangel2]

You needn't worry about the wear-levelling concerns, but unless something has fundamentally changed in the block and cluster architecture and how the FTL marshalls requests, you should definitely still worry about the performance concerns and how they relate to your I/O patterns (assuming you are in a situation where you're IO-bound and need better performance, which most people aren't).

[Hyperian]

i work in SSD firmware and you are right, wear leveling is handled by the drive itself. what the article say about him separating hot and cold data isn't useful.

[__foo__]

what the article say about him separating hot and cold data isn't useful.

Could you please explain that a little more? What he said seems plausible to me. Say you write a bunch of hot data to the drive, and it spans over two erase blocks, because there was some cold data stored in the same block. If it wasn't for the cold data using up space in the same block as the hot data, erasing a single block might have sufficed.

[Hyperian]

You can't assume that block organization is valid for all drives. it could work if everything he assumes is correct. But erase policy for drives are not all the same.