There is a main control chip inside the SSD, which can automatically update and optimize the performance of the SSD, such as wear balancing WL, garbage collection GC, dynamic temperature adjustment, etc. Therefore, industrial-grade SSDs do not require regular maintenance.
The SSD main control chip is responsible for all operations of the entire solid state drive. Including read and write operations and FTL layer related operations, such as wear balancing, garbage collection, block management, ECC error correction, dynamic temperature adjustment, etc. These operations are automatically controlled during the operation of the solid state drive after the main control chip is powered on.
1. Wear balance.
The purpose of wear leveling is to avoid overuse of flash data blocks. When the number of erase and write times of data blocks exceeds the threshold, the main control chip will automatically activate the Wear-Leveling function and replace the data blocks to balance the number of erase times of data blocks in NAND flash memory. This will help increase the lifespan of the SSD.
2. Garbage recycling.
Garbage collection of industrial-grade SSDs is similar to disk defragmentation in mechanical hard drives. Disk defragmentation of mechanical hard drives requires manual processing. The garbage collection GC of the solid state drive is automatically controlled by the internal firmware of the solid state drive. The storage medium of solid-state drives is NAND flash memory, and NAND flash memory cannot be overwritten or written to.
That is, when we want to overwrite file 1 and write new data, the data will not be written to the original storage data location (assumed to be data block A), but to other data storage locations (assumed to be data block B).
At this time, file 1 is stored in data block B. Data block B is called a valid data block, while the previous data block A is called an invalid data block. When we use SSD for a period of time, there are many invalid data blocks in the SSD. These invalid data blocks will reduce the storage space utilization of the solid state drive.
Therefore, in order to improve the service life and utilization of the solid-state drive, the solid-state drive main control firmware will automatically start garbage collection on a certain node, write valid data blocks into the block, and then erase the block containing invalid data blocks.
3. Dynamic temperature adjustment.
In industrial-grade SSD, there is also an automatic control function, namely dynamic temperature adjustment. As SSDs become faster and faster, the heating problem of SSDs has become a key factor limiting SSD performance. Therefore, many SSD master controllers have the function of automatically adjusting the temperature. When the SSD temperature reaches a certain threshold, the main control will automatically reduce the operating frequency to achieve the purpose of cooling the SSD.
