Comment Re:Do cleanup in the OS (Score 2, Insightful) 156
- "idleness" should refer ONLY to the SSD not being used, not the OS being idle, in which case they both have approximately the same information.
- The OS should NOT hold unimportant writes for very long, and doing GC during this time does not change the possibility for important writes to be necessary
- I agree here. However, on battery power, I would expect an SSD would be sent to standby very quickly as if it were physically spinning, in which case the SSD firmware should know better than to do GC during standby, and with a definition of idle being 5+ minutes of zero-usage, it could be effectively the same as the OS not doing it on battery power. But I am only speculating
On my list of AGAINST the OS doing GC i have:
- EVERY OS would have to support it in their next update to be as effective as having GC done in the firmware.
- OS software engineers are not likely to know the best way to design a GC for SSDs, leave it to the manufacturers who build the thing.
There are some pros to letting the OS manage it, but I think it's riskier. I would suggest the firmware do the GC but have an interface for the OS to override the GC for flexibilities sake.