SanDisk says it has found a way to make solid state drives run as much as 100 times faster. It would answer a common complaint, but wouldn’t necessarily be the breakthrough the technology needs to become a mainstream alternative to traditional hard drives.

The firm has developed a new system to take care of two problems caused by the way the disks work. At the moment a solid state drive tries to write data across the disk in a logical order. However, when a section of the drive has data (that is in use) already, the computer has to erase the entire section and then rewrite it with both the old and new data. This is much more time-consuming and particularly inefficient in cases where the new data is a small piece of information.

The new system, ExtremeFFS, does a much better job of finding space with an appropriate gap for the new data, cutting the time erasing and rewriting process. The system also solves a second problem: by spreading the data more widely across the drive, it minimizes the problem of certain sections being accessed and rewritten more than others. This lessens the chances of a particular section physically wearing out prematurely.

As well as improving performance, SanDisk is calling on the entire SSD industry to develop more accurate ways to measure performance and lifespan, arguing that the measurements used for traditional hard drives don’t fairy reflect an SSD’s capability. It’s calling for a Long-term Data Endurance (LDE) benchmark, which states how long a drive should last given an average 10GB a day being written to it.

The firm is also calling for SSD speeds to be measured by averaging read and write times and using that data to produce a figure called ‘virtual RPM’. The idea is to show what speed of traditional drive you’d need to get the same performance.

Both the actual improvements to the drives and the marketing benefits of the new benchmarks should boost the chances of SSDs catching on with the general public. But that doesn’t solve other obstacles, including price barriers and the fact that Windows simply isn’t set up to take full advantage of an SSD’s capabilities.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 6:54 pm under Technology, Vista.

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