Patent · US Active

Wear leveling for low-wear areas of low-latency random read memory

US8001318B1 · kind B1 · utility

93Cited by
1References
27Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateOct 28, 2008
Grant dateAug 16, 2011
Priority date
Expiry dateFeb 6, 2030

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06F2212/7211
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

Described herein are method and apparatus for performing wear leveling of erase-units of an LLRRM device that considers all active erase-units. Wear counts of all active erase-units (containing client data) and free erase-units (not containing client data) are tracked. Wear counts are used to determine low-wear active erase-units having relatively low wear counts and high-wear free erase-units having relatively high wear counts. In some embodiments, data contents of low-wear active erase-units are transferred to high-wear free erase-units, whereby the low-wear active erase-units are converted to free erase-units and may later store different client data which may increase the current rate of wear for the erase-unit. The high-wear free erase-units are converted to active erase-units that store client data that is infrequently erased/written, which may reduce the current rate of wear for the erase-unit. As such, wear is spread more evenly among erase-units of the LLRRM device.

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.