This is Part 3 over 6 of “Coding for SSDs”, covering Sections 3 and 4. For other parts and sections, you can refer to the Table to Contents. This is a series of articles that I wrote to share what I learned while documenting myself on SSDs, and on how to make code perform well on SSDs. If you’re in a rush, you can also go directly to Part 6, which is summarizing the content from all the other parts.
In this part, I am explaining how writes are handled at the page and block level, and I talk about the fundamental concepts of write amplification and wear leveling. Moreover, I describe what is a Flash Translation Layer (FTL), and I cover its two main purposes, logical block mapping and garbage collection. More particularly, I explain how write operations work in the context of a hybrid log-block mapping.
Translations: This article was translated to Simplified Chinese by Xiong Duo and to Korean by Matt Lee (이 성욱).
