Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Explaining M.2 SSDs" video.
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What about the block-level interface?
Conventional hard drives present an interface where the OS can reliably read and write numbered blocks in an arbitrary order, and build a conventional disk-based filesystem on top of that.
Flash storage, on the other hand needs wear-levelling to try to reduce the chance of blocks going bad, and also prefers to do writes in larger chunks. SSD controllers go to a lot of trouble to hide these peculiarities, and present an interface to the OS that looks just like a disk.
However, some OSes (like Linux) have purpose-built filesystems that are designed to deal with the characteristics of flash storage, including explicitly taking wear-levelling into account. That means they don’t need the SSD controller providing that disk-emulation layer, which just adds overhead and gets in the way.
Are there “bare bones” flash drives, if you like, that do away with the disk emulation, and offer a simpler, more direct controller interface? Would they offer better performance when used with such filesystems?
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