[wand3r]

I think the explanation is sound maybe (I am not that familiar) but the analogy gets a bit lost when you talk about buckets of houses and buckets of vacant lots.

Maybe there is a better analogy or paradigm to view this through.

[cduzz]

I should have been a little more clear -- the urban planner managing the house building / copying and neighborhood destruction (the realtime controller) The rules are: 1) You can build a house kinda quickly 2) You can't modify a house once it is built 3) you can only build a house on a vacant lot 4) you can change the "mailing address" (relative to the physical location) of the house 5) you can only knock down whole blocks of houses at once (not one at a time) 6) each time you flatten a block more crap accumulates in that block until after a while you can't build there anymore. 7) the flatten / rebuild step may be quite slow (because you have lots of houses to build) 8) You can lie and say you built a house before it is finished, if you don't have too many houses to build. (if you've got an SSD with a capacitor / battery or tiny cache and reserved area for that cache) 9) you've lied to the user and you actually have 5-100% more build-able area than you've advertised. 10) you have a finite area so eventually the dead space accumulates to the point where you can no longer safely build.

So -- you keep track of vacant lots and "dead" houses (abandoned but not flattened); whenever you've got spare time you will copy blocks with some ratio of "live" to abandoned houses to new lots so the new block only has live houses.

These pending / anticipatory compaction/garbage collection operations are what I refer to as "buckets" -- having to compact 300 (neighborhoods) blocks to achieve 300 writes is going to result in glacial performance because of this huge write amplification (behind the scenes the drive is duplicating 100s of mb / gb of data to write a small amount of user modifications)

As you might imagine, there are lots of strategies to how to approach this problem, some of which give you an SSD with extremely unpredictable (when full) performance, others will give a much more consistent but "slower" performance.