How to extend SSD life expectancy by 3 folds? Renice Non-Balance Wear Leveling Algorithm

The first portion of this article introduces the background of wear leveling and some commonly used algorithm while the second portion covers a kind of wear leveling that can prolong life by three folds: Non-balance Algorithm. Experts may skip directly to the later portion. In order to prolong the life cycle of NAND flash by avoiding some blocks being frequently erased and becoming bad blocks rapidly while the existence of other less erased blocks will cause an unbalance Program/Erase situation that shorten the overall SSD product life as a drawback. There are various algorithm towards wear leveling and garbage collection raised by NAND flash practitioner as strategy to avoid these potential problems. Background of Wear Leveling Algorithm The wear leveling algorithm is based on the basic characteristics of flash memory: 1. Do not support local update (outplace-update that is data in original location cannot be overwrite or change directly, this data will need to be relocated t...