Coding for SSDs
Part 6 in particular is a decent distillation of stuff to keep in mind that should apply across SSDs from multiple vendors. It would be nice to have benchmarks that validate the individual assertions, of course.<p>There's a lot of complexity going on behind the scenes of modern SSDs. Simplistic benchmarks as posted on most review sites often don't address real-world performance. The ones I pay most attention to are things like BootRacer; it's quite remarkable how often a drive will be slower at booting Windows than a competitor, even when it beats them in simple metrics like sequential / random reads / writes with different queue depths.<p>I can see the potential for firmware being optimized for modalities that crop up often in benchmarks but less often elsewhere: the aforementioned sequential / random reads and writes with different block sizes and queue depths. Doing well on benchmarks probably drives a bunch of sales. But detecting and switching modality may not be latency-free, and shortcuts taken to improve absolute performance in those modalities may harm global performance in a real-world IO mix.