Flash Performance and Reliability

This lesson discusses the performance and reliability of flash.

We'll cover the following...

Performance

Because we’re interested in building a storage device out of raw flash chips, it is worthwhile to understand their basic performance characteristics. The figure below presents a rough summary of some numbers found in the popular press“Understanding TLC Flash” by Kristian Vatto. AnandTech, September, 2012. Available: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5067/understanding-tlc-nand. A short description about TLC flash and its characteristics.. Therein, the author presents the basic operation latency of reads, programs, and erases across SLC, MLC, and TLC flash, which store 1, 2, and 3 bits of information per cell, respectively.

As we can see from the table, read latencies are quite good, taking just 10s of microseconds to complete. Program ...