Partitioning can have a big influence on the speed and the lifetime of an SSD. Mainly with older industrial systems, whose operating systems still originate from the time before the wide spread of SSDs, this problem occurs frequently. The cause and remedies are discussed in this Application Note.

With hard disks, there is a fixed assignment between logical and physical addresses. With NAND flash, however, existing data cannot simply be overwritten because...

A sudden power failure can lead to various problems with flash media, resulting in a total failure, which is the worst case. This can be remedied by storage media that can still write all the data in the cache to the flash, recognizable by the addition PLP (Power Loss Protection).

But how to test the robustness against sudden power failures as part of product qualification? Our latest TechNote gives a detailed insight and provides an instruction for building your own test hardware.

The presence of factory bad blocks in NAND flash is as much a technology reason as the occurrence of additional bad blocks during the lifetime.
Both are no (negative) quality indications.

However, with the occurrence of bad blocks during the lifetime, the correct handling of these events by the firmware is critical in order not to lose the new data as well as the already stored data of such blocks.

Unlike hard drives or NOR flash, NAND flash does not have a fixed mapping of logical memory addresses to physical memory addresses.

The assignment takes place via mapping tables, which are managed by the firmware of the storage medium.