Western Governors University (WGU) ITEC2022 D386 Hardware and Operating Systems Essentials Practice Exam

Wear leveling is a critical feature of solid-state drives (SSDs) that helps to prolong the lifespan of the flash memory by ensuring that write and erase cycles are distributed evenly across all memory blocks. Solid-state drives use NAND flash memory, which has a limited number of program/erase cycles. If a particular block were to be written to and erased repeatedly, it would wear out more quickly than others, leading to potential data loss and reduced reliability.

By implementing wear leveling, the SSD's firmware manages the logical block addressing in such a way that it does not always map the same logical addresses to the same physical memory blocks. Instead, logical data is written to various physical blocks at different times, ensuring that all blocks are used uniformly. This distribution mitigates the risk of early block failure, thus enhancing the overall durability and performance of the SSD over time.

In contrast, data encryption, over-provisioning, and data mirroring serve different purposes, such as securing data, improving performance through additional storage space, and creating redundancy for data protection, respectively, but they do not address the specific issue of wear leveling found in flash memory.