{
  "slug": "flashblox",
  "term": "FlashBlox",
  "aliases": [],
  "definition": "FlashBlox is a research SSD virtualization design that assigns channels or dies to tenants and periodically migrates data to balance wear.",
  "note": "Channel isolation reserves transfer paths; die isolation still shares a channel bus. Soft-planes are software regions striped across physical planes, not independent NAND planes. [flashblox]\n\nWear balancing swaps heavily worn resources with low-wear-rate ones. Requests to the erase-blocks being swapped wait; other blocks remain serviceable. The API requires log compaction aligned with the virtual SSD's erase granularity, and tenants cannot borrow one another's pre-erased blocks. [flashblox]\n\nEvidence boundary: the 2017 prototype's migration measurements are distinct from its simulated lifetime results. The reported 95% of ideal lifetime is a model result, not observed fleet survival or a guarantee against arbitrary changing adversarial traffic. [flashblox]",
  "status": "research",
  "advantages": [],
  "limitations": [
    {
      "text": "Physical partitioning does not remove migration pauses or every device-wide shared resource.",
      "citationIds": [
        "flashblox"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "related": [
    "open-channel-ssd",
    "channel-nand",
    "nand-plane",
    "wear-leveling",
    "inter-flow-interference",
    "slowdown-fairness"
  ],
  "supersedes": [],
  "supersededBy": [],
  "firstSeen": null,
  "lastSeen": null,
  "updated": "2026-11-10",
  "citations": [
    {
      "id": "flashblox",
      "title": "Huang et al. FlashBlox: Achieving Both Performance Isolation and Uniform Lifetime for Virtualized SSDs. FAST 2017, sections 2-4.",
      "url": "https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/fast17/fast17_huang.pdf",
      "accessed": "2026-11-10"
    },
    {
      "id": "hesela",
      "title": "Hesela: FlashBlox, isolation and its migration window",
      "url": "https://hesela.com/analyses/ssd-fairness-shared-queues/#flashblox-isolation",
      "accessed": "2026-11-10"
    }
  ],
  "provenance": [
    "Full primary-paper review, including the adversarial-workload caveat in section 3.1.4 footnote 2. No FlashBlox execution, performance replication or device-lifetime measurement."
  ]
}