4 ms·
I'm wondering about this for a long time and hope if any experts can explain this: is there any difference in append-only & small-sized log writing vs sequentia
by riobard 5y ago
I'm wondering about this for a long time and hope if any experts can explain this: is there any difference in append-only & small-sized log writing vs sequentially filling an SSD/USB flash drive/SD cards?
I guess there are significant differences due to flash wear-leveling and write-amplification but I'm not sure. What I know so far is that there's difference in wear-leveling because apparently cheap USB flash drives/SD cards might not do global wear-leveling but rather only limited local wear-leveling. This shouldn't be a problem for append-only logging because it's not writing to the same block repeatedly.
However for write-amplification I'm a bit confused. Does append-only logging to an existing NAND block require reprogramming as well? If so, small appends will leave to very large ratio of write-amplification and significantly shorten the NAND life time, right?
This is particularly important for devices like Raspberry Pi which rely on USB flash drives/SD cards for logging.