Wear leveling

Wear leveling (also written as wear levelling) is a technique[1] for prolonging the service life of some kinds of erasable computer storage media, such as flash memory, which is used in solid-state drives (SSDs) and USB flash drives, and phase-change memory. There are several wear leveling mechanisms that provide varying levels of longevity enhancement in such memory systems.[2][3]

The term preemptive wear leveling (PWL) has been used by Western Digital to describe their preservation technique used on hard disk drives (HDDs) designed for storing audio and video data.[4] However, HDDs generally are not wear-leveled devices in the context of this article.

  1. ^ U.S. patent 6,850,443 Wear leveling techniques for flash memory systems.
  2. ^ Perdue, Ken (2010-04-30). "Wear Leveling Application Note" (PDF). Spansion. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-06-07. Retrieved 12 August 2010.
  3. ^ "USB Flash Wear-Leveling and Life Span" (PDF). Corsair. June 2007. Archived from the original (PDF) on 13 October 2007. Retrieved 27 July 2013.
  4. ^ "Western Digital AV Hard Drive Product Information". Western Digital. Archived from the original on 2010-01-02. Retrieved 2010-06-01.