A storage aware memory controller and method for managing a physical storage system. A described controller includes: a system for mapping physical memory space into a memory region and a storage region; a system for applying different error protections schemes, in which a fine-grained memory fault tolerance scheme is applied to data in the memory region and a course-grained memory fault tolerance scheme is applied to data in the storage region; and an in-memory storage filesystem that compresses and stores individual pages of data in the storage region, wherein each page of data is compressed into a set of codewords that are codeword aligned such that no codeword shares compressed data from different pages, and wherein the in-memory storage filesystem stores a compression-aware logical block address (CA-LBA) for each page of data.