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Last updated: Thursday, November 6, 2008

Solid-state drives with random write speeds as much as 100 times faster than existing systems. That’s the promise of a “next-generation patented flash management system” unveiled Wednesday by SanDisk. The company said the system, called ExtremeFFS and announced at the WinHEC 2008 trade show in Los Angeles, will ship in SanDisk products next year. Decoupling Physical and Logical Locations Rich Heye, senior vice president and general manager for SanDisk’s SSD Business Unit, said SSDs used with Windows Vista require a large number of random writes instead of sequential access. To get the best performance out of such random writes, SanDisk created ExtremeFFS. The company said the system operates on a page-based algorithm, which means physical and logical locations can be separated. The SSD can write data to wherever is most convenient and efficient, which results in a performance improvement of as much as 100 times. ExtremeFFS also uses all the NAND (not and) channels independently, so some can write while others deal with what the company called “garbage collecting.” The system can also learn user patterns because it has usage-based content localization. After many uses, it knows where to place data for better performance and endurance. “This feature might not show up in benchmarks,” Heye said, “but we believe it is the right thing to do for end users.” New Metrics Because of the new ways that ExtremeFFS tackles the performance issue, SanDisk has suggested that new metrics are needed to measure the improvement, especially in comparing SSDs with hard disk drives. Heye said that, since hard-drive performance is measured in revolutions per minute, or RPMs, SSDs need a comparable metric, such as virtual RPM or vRPM. He added that vRPM answers the question, “How fast would you have to spin a virtual HDD to achieve the level of performance seen by an SSD in a…

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SanDisk SSD Tech Could Boost Write Speeds 100 Times

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