In the first installment of this series, I covered some of the peculiarities of NAND flash, especially in view of the unidirectional programming and the resulting problematic for solid state drives. To put things into perspective, flash memory was originally developed as an inexpensive media for digital cameras with rather limited write/erase cycles and, with the exception of some high-end cameras in use by professional photographers, rather infrequent accesses to the media.
It is fairly easy to appreciate how the adaptation of this low-cycle frequency flash technology into a completely different set of application, specifically the use in solid state drives can cause some problems. Moreover, adaptation of the ATA technology and related file systems to accommodate NAND flash also had to take a few hurdles to get where it is at the moment and, to be true, at the present time the coalescence of the two worlds still needs to be considered to be in its infancy, with the real thing yet to come anytime in the near or far future.
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