Methods and apparatus for selection of memory locations for data access operations in a dispersed storage network (DSN) are disclosed. In various embodiments, a dispersed storage (DS) processing module of the DSN receives a DSN access request regarding at least one data segment of a data object. The DS processing module determines a DSN address associated with the DSN access request and performs a scoring function using the DSN address and one or more properties of DSN memory to produce a storage scoring resultant. The storage scoring resultant is utilized to identify a set of storage units of the DSN. A set of access requests is then sent to the set of storage units regarding the DSN access request. The scoring function can include, for example, performing deterministic functions, normalizing functions and ranking functions to produce the storage scoring resultant.