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Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

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Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

#31
post #25
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your mental model of how SSDs work is a bit inaccurate. Read operations will not trigger wear leveling during normal use. Reads will only cause the SSD to start moving data around if there's a correctable ECC error with the read, prompting the drive to write a fresh and corrected copy. Correctable read errors can crop up from data degradation over time, or from read disturb errors (analogous to DRAM rowhammer…

You write that reads will not trigger wear leveling, and then you go on to explain multiple scenarios in which reads will trigger rewrites. Those rewrites can cause elevated read latency. I have done SSD code reviews with multiple SSD vendors, and there are some which will trigger wear leveling after a set number of reads, instead of waiting for elevated bit error rates. And yes, the elevated read latency should be i…

> but the world is full of incorrectly designed applications.

No it's not. This particular kind of incorrectly-designed application cannot be prevalent if the kind of hardware it requires to function at all is still new and rare.

Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

#32
post #31
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You write that reads will not trigger wear leveling, and then you go on to explain multiple scenarios in which reads will trigger rewrites. Those rewrites can cause elevated read latency. I have done SSD code reviews with multiple SSD vendors, and there are some which will trigger wear leveling after a set number of reads, instead of waiting for elevated bit error rates. And yes, the elevated read latency should be i…

> but the world is full of incorrectly designed applications. No it's not. This particular kind of incorrectly-designed application cannot be prevalent if the kind of hardware it requires to function at all is still new and rare.

Minor audio glitches due to read latency never happen? My assertion is that there exist audio applications which incorrectly utilize buffers, which would then be improved by more consistent read latency.
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