Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 6th Nov 2008 15:33 UTC, submitted by Gregory
It's no secret that SSDs suffer from performance penalties when it comes to small random writes. Even though more modern SSD try to solve some of these issues hardware-wise, software can also play a major role. Instead of resorting to things like delaying all writes until shutdown and storing them in RAM, SanDisk claims it has a better option. At WinHEC yesterday, the company introduced its Extreme FFS, which it claims will improve write performance on SSDs by a factor of 100.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
No. The device will just look like a hard disk. Just an array of sectors, on which you write whatever file system you like.
The device will map your logical sector numbers to physical flash pages, using what is essentially a dynamic map.
Having not read the details of ExtremeFFS (it is probably patented) I theorize it operates by collecting together temporally close sector writes in a cache, and writing them all in one go to a fresh page. The garbage collection looks for stale or partially stale pages, queues any live data for writing in the next write batch, then cleans the (now) stale page ready for use in the free list.
Of course, this may all be wide of the mark, in which case sorry for the noise, but a SSD that required drivers over and above the link layer (SATA) would have a very limited market and just wouldn't make sense.