{
  "slug": "static-wear-leveling",
  "term": "Static wear leveling",
  "aliases": [
    "static wear levelling"
  ],
  "definition": "Static wear leveling relocates infrequently updated data so that lightly worn occupied flash blocks can return to the write-allocation pool.",
  "note": "Linux UBI illustrates migration from a less-erased used block to a more-erased free block; this is distinct from bit-flip scrubbing. [ubi]\n\nThe destination must still satisfy retention needs. Persistent code placed in blocks near their wear limit can lose retention margin. [macronix]\n\nRelocation adds flash writes; cold here describes update frequency, not temperature. [jiao]\n\nOBP, DP and PWL are the static policies evaluated in Jiao and Yang's 2025 extension. That evaluation excludes dynamic wear leveling, so it cannot establish that every dynamic policy has the same tradeoffs. [jiao2025]",
  "status": "shipping",
  "advantages": [],
  "limitations": [],
  "supersedes": [],
  "supersededBy": [],
  "firstSeen": null,
  "lastSeen": null,
  "updated": "2026-10-18",
  "related": [
    "wear-leveling",
    "dynamic-wear-leveling",
    "ftl",
    "data-retention",
    "write-amplification"
  ],
  "citations": [
    {
      "id": "ubi",
      "title": "Linux UBI wear-leveling implementation, introductory comments (pinned source revision).",
      "url": "https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux/+/c7decec2f2d2ab0366567f9e30c0e1418cece43f/drivers/mtd/ubi/wl.c",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    },
    {
      "id": "macronix",
      "title": "Macronix. Wear Leveling in NAND Flash Memory. AN0289, revision 1, March 10, 2014, p. 2.",
      "url": "https://www.macronix.com/Lists/ApplicationNote/Attachments/1913/AN0289V1-Wear%20Leveling%20in%20NAND%20Flash%20Memory.pdf",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    },
    {
      "id": "jiao",
      "title": "Jiao, Bhimani and Kim. Wear Leveling in SSDs Considered Harmful. HotStorage 2022, sections 1-2. DOI 10.1145/3538643.3539750.",
      "url": "https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~awang/courses/cop5611_s2024/wear-leveling-harmful.pdf",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    },
    {
      "id": "hesela-foundations",
      "title": "Hesela: Wear Leveling, mechanisms and tradeoffs",
      "url": "https://hesela.com/tech/wear-leveling/",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    },
    {
      "id": "jiao2025",
      "title": "Jiao and Yang. Wear Leveling in SSDs Considered Harmful: A Case for Capacity Variance. Electronics 14, 4169 (2025), sections 3-5.",
      "url": "https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/electronics/electronics-14-04169/article_deploy/electronics-14-04169.pdf",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    }
  ]
}