- Thursday, 26 November 2009
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Sandisk speeds up SSD
DISK DABBLER Sandisk has announced that it can make Solid State Drives work up to 100 times faster than is currently possible.
The company's new Flash File System (FFS... yes we know... stop sniggering at the back there) will ship with devices in early 2009.
Extreme FFS operates on a page-based algorithm, which, according to Sandisk's boffins, means there is no fixed coupling between the physical and logical location of data. When a sector of data is written, the SSD puts it where it is most convenient and efficient. The result is an improvement in random write performance – theoretically by up to 100 times – as well as in overall endurance.
The system also learns user patterns and, over time, will know where to park frequently-used chunks of data. µ
L'Inq
Sandisk
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I can only imagine how much more this will cost...
The FFS stuff will be done at a firmware level and can no doubt be done pretty cheaply. The major cost of a decent sized flash drive will still be the flash memory itself.

The point is that existing filesystems (NTFS, FAT, ext3 for you Linux boys) were written for hard disks. Sandisk is just trying to balance that. Flash's one weakpoint is lots of small random writes.

Just one more nail in the hard disk coffin. I was argueing this with Seagate investors a year ago. Since then their shares fell 60%+ and I made a mint!
Maybe SanDisk should have been bought, as write speed, u[p till now, has been 1/2 read speed. So SanDisk1, All Others 0.

Also, Like Idea of Pulling Up Its'(sandisk)Technology By its' Own BootStraps.
TS Drashek
Err, its a file system. It should be free.
It doesn't make any difference WHERE on the disk you put a block. It's not a hard drive--there's no "seek time".
It might be right that there is "No seek time" or very little. The slow down was caused on the File System and Operating system level, not the hardware level. There are many checking and correcting procedures during a write. For different FS, writing speed and results are different. Try it for yourself.

So, changing/improving a file system for flash based memory may help as described by Sandisk. It makes sense. Whether the new file system works as described is another matter, but believe me, file system does affect performance.
I like this idea. The Flash Transaction Layer (FTL) which is programmed into the firmware of current SSDs (for compatibility) is rubbish. You basically wind up with a device that has all the pitfalls of both pancake-stack storage and flash.

I'm hoping that we can re-flash our old firmwares when this is stable. There's also some Open Sauce SSD filesystems in the works :)
How long will it take their competetors to reverse engi.. I mean "EXAMINE" it and make their own version?
Intel already has this technology, or something very close to it. and OCZ's core 3 series will likely be very very fast as well.