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SanDisk's ExtremeFSS will boost SSD performance significantly

6 November 2008 19:12 by James "Dela" Delahunty | 2 comments

SanDisk Corp. has announced a new flash memory management system that it claims will significantly boost performance from Solid-State Drives (SSD). ExtremeFSS will boost the speed of writing common types of data by 100 times, said Don Barnetson, senior director of marketing at SanDisk. The system will allow data to be written to the drive without erasing and rewriting nearby data. The ExtremeFSS system will also boost the longevity of SSDs.

Currently available SSD drives are marketed as having significant advantages over mechanical spinning hard drives; they produce less heat, use less power and would seemingly be less prone to failure. However, in reality they were found to under-perform compared to standard mechanical HDDs when they were first widely used in notebooks.

They tend to be slower at writing small amounts of data to the memory, while performing quite well with large files. This isn't very convenient for excessive use. In addition to announcing ExtremeFSS, SanDisk also pushed for the industry to adopt a few helpful metrics. Long-term Data Endurance (LDE) for example would be a measure of the amount of data that could be written to an SSD before it fails.

As an example, a drive with a value of 40 TBW (terabytes written) would last for 11 years at an average of 10GB per day. Barnetson suggested that an LDE measure would be similar to an MPG (miles-per-gallon) measure for a car. A second metric SanDisk proposes is "virtual rpm," which would measure how well the SSD compares to a mechanical drive at a certain speed (measured in revolutions per minute, or RPM).

A third proposal from SanDisk was for a SMART-like system for SSD drives to help predict failure in adequate time to rescue data.

Permalink to this article | Topic: Gadgets

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Pop_Smith (Senior Member) 7 November 2008 2:19
This is great news! Now if the price keeps dropping I might have to throw a RAID 0 pair (yeah, I wish!) when I build a new gaming rig. They claim the ExtremeFSS will boost the writing of "common types of data" by 100x. While I am not sure what they mean by "common types", it is good news none the less. However, I am wondering if the new ExtremeFSS will improve read times as well. If it does improve read times like it is supposed to with write times that would be awesome. Peace [ + quote]
Mr-Movies (Member) 8 November 2008 21:10
I thought this technology was still too slow but saw a demo that was very impressive however you're absolutely right the cost has to come down. [ + quote]