Woodhouse on flash storage

[Mitch Bradley]

David might be right in principle, but when component price matters, you 
have to buy the hardware that the mass market offers.  Right now the 
sweet spot is "smart" devices with embedded Flash Translation Layer 
firmware.  I'd place my bet on that trend continuing.

Linux does not "drive" the mass market.  Asian volume manufacturers 
barely know what Linux is.  Maybe that is changing, but there is a long 
way to go before the reality on the ground changes.

David minimizes the impact of NAND geometry changes.  The reality is 
that it doesn't have to change "that much" to "flip" the decision.  We 
at OLPC tried in vain to find a way to get past 2 GiB with the internal 
NAND.  The problem is that the controller hardware is coupled to the 
NAND technology (MLC vs SLC) and page size.  The coupling is caused by 
the fact that the error correcting codes must be tuned to those 
factors.  ECC for 2K-page SLC is just no good for 4K MLC.  ECC 
generation and checking must be done in hardware for adequate 
performance.  Our existing NAND controller just didn't work for the 
generation of chips that has largely supplanted the chips we were using.

So get a new controller, right?  Well, if you go and try to buy one, you 
will find that they all come with embedded microprocessors that 
implement a Flash Translation Layer, and the manufacturers closely guard 
the operational details.  It would be nice if they would reveal their 
secrets so the FOSS community could write some "better" firmware for 
those controllers.  Good luck making that happen.  And good luck getting 
it deployed before the chip has been superseded.

You might think that System on Chip devices for the embedded market 
might yield a different answer.  That's not what we saw.  Every time we 
looked at an SoC presentation, invariably the device did not have a 
suitable raw NAND controller.  That is what started me to thinking that 
raw NAND was about to get killed in the market by "managed NAND".  
Everything these days has an SD controller or three.

David is absolutely right that many of the current FTL-equipped devices 
are nearly hopeless.  But that is not the same as saying that they all 
are.  A few devices have done quite well in our stress testing.  Over 
time, I expect the situation to get better and better as the firmware 
that "gets it right" supplants the earlier tries.