The “Break it Down” Blog

Grant Gochnauer just sent in a link to an announcement that SanDisk has improved random disk writes on SSDs by a factor of 100x. This improvement is a direct result of SanDisk utilizing it’s new ExtremeFFS file system.

The core design elements of ExtremeFFS that make this improvement possible are:

• Page-based algorithm: Customized for popular operating systems such as Vista, ExtremeFFS uses a page-based algorithm with no fixed coupling between physical and logical location. This gives SanDisk SSD the freedom to store a sector of written data where it is most convenient and efficient.
• Fully non-blocking architecture: NAND channels operate independently as required by user activities, with some reading while others are writing and garbage collecting.
• User pattern learning: ExtremeFFS can learn user patterns to store data used with higher frequency in quickly accessible locations.

With the last two features being the most important. The idea that the drive actually profiles usage and storage locations over time for more optimized reading/writing is pretty incredible; more specifically designing that feature directly into a file system.

Before ExtremeFFS, write speeds to SSDs was a bit lack-luster, some times being slower than write speeds for standard SATA drives (although not by much). With random read-speeds on SSDs being so insanely high in the first place it was always a drag that the write speeds weren’t faster; it looks like SanDisk’s work is going to improve performance across the board.

Disks aren’t expected to start shipping with this file system until 2009, but SanDisk expects them to outperformance standard laptop/notebook drives by a factor of 6x when they are integrated into those systems.

Thanks electronista!