What is the primary purpose of wear leveling in flash memory?

• A. Reduce power consumption by idling blocks
• B. Evenly distribute writes across blocks to increase memory lifespan
• C. Speed up read operations through caching
• D. Increase storage capacity by using more cells

Answer: (B)

Flash memory has a limited number of erase/program cycles per block, so distributing wear across the device is essential to longevity. Wear leveling uses a translation mechanism to map logical addresses to physical blocks and writes data to the blocks with the least wear, migrating data when needed. This prevents a single block from wearing out too quickly and extends the overall lifespan of the memory.

It’s not about idling blocks to save power, nor about speeding reads through caching, nor about increasing capacity by using more cells. The core purpose is to even out write/erase activity to maximize endurance.