2 ms·
No, they are not just a converter that exposes raw NAND to your PC. Rather they abstract away all the details of how painful raw NAND is to deal with into simpl
by dezgeg 3y ago
No, they are not just a converter that exposes raw NAND to your PC. Rather they abstract away all the details of how painful raw NAND is to deal with into simple "read/write sectors" interface that all your normal filesystems like ext4, NTFS, etc. deal with.
Raw NAND comes with various pain-in-the-ass limitations such as: only erasable in huge (~megabytes) blocks at a time, only writable in slightly-uncomfortably-big chunks (like 32KB or so), and erasing a given region can be done a limited amount of times before it breaks. Oh, and all those details (like exact sizes of erases and writes) will change time to time as manufacturing processes of NAND dies get more advanced.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoThat's software, not hardware. And operating systems have long dealt with things like variable sector sizes. You want the abstraction layer. What you don't want is for it to be a black box, and what you shouldn't care about is whether the silicon that runs the code is soldered to the flash chips or not.