SanDisk Soups Up SSDs with Flash Management

By Greg McNevin

November 11, 2008: With the use of solid state disk (SSD) technology becoming more common every, SanDisk has rolled out a new flash management system that it says improves SSD performance and reliability.

Called ExtremeFFS, the company claims the new management system yields dramatic improvement in performance and reliability for computing applications, and has the potential to accelerate random write speeds by up to 100 times over existing systems.

Presented by Rich Heye, senior vice president and general manager for SanDisk’s Solid-State Drive (SSD) Business Unit, at WinHEC 2008 in Los Angeles, ExtremeFFS and two complimentary metrics – vRPM and LDE – can help end-users evaluate SSDs according to Heye.

He says that vRPM enables comparisons in performance between an SSD and a hard disk drive (HDD) or another SSD, and LDE calculates the lifespan of a solid-state drive.

For SSDs to perform optimally in Windows Vista, and thus replicate or surpass the functionality of hard disk drives, Heye claims a new flash management technology was needed to accelerate SSD write speed and endurance, hence the introduction of ExtremeFFS.

“SSDs will revolutionise client storage, but we need new benchmarks that allow them to be treated differently than HDDs,” says Heye.

SanDisk expects the system to begin shipping in its products during 2009.

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