Suppose you have an SSD, where a half of its capacity is taken by rarely (or never) changing files, for example a media collection or game installations. Over time this will lead to a significant imbalance of writes, because these static files will just sit in their blocks, and the remaining half of the drive will be overwritten twice as often.
Do SSD controllers implement any clever tricks to deal with this situation? As far as I understand, wear leveling algorithms only balance writes between free blocks. Perhaps they implement some algorithm of relocating these static files from time to time to free the blocks with low write counts?
In case if controllers do not do this automatically, is there something that can be done manually by a user to balance writes? I cannot think of anything other than erasing the whole drive and reinstalling OS/apps from scratch, hoping that they will use up the blocks with low write counts.
P.S. Just to be clear, I know that it is usually advised to keep the media library on an HDD. The question is about a situation when it is not possible.
Best Answer
There are techniques for wear leveling which move data which is static for a long time to allow those areas of the SSD to be used by more rapidly-changing data. This is termed "static wear leveling" (which sounds like an oxymoron at first). A little more info here:
http://www.micron.com/~/media/Documents/Products/Technical%20Note/NAND%20Flash/tn2961_wear_leveling_in_nand.pdf