One aspect of a storage device includes a non-volatile memory (NVM) comprising a plurality of memory locations each associated with a physical address, where the NVM is configured to store a logical-to-physical (L2P) mapping table associating a logical address with each of the physical addresses of the NVM; and a controller configured to support a scratchpad session by allocating one or more of the memory locations as scratchpad memory for a host, where the controller is further configured to disable updates to the L2P mapping table for the one or more memory locations allocated to the scratchpad memory across power cycles during the scratchpad session.