SanDisk Hopes to Remedy Woeful Vista SSD Performance With New File System

From DailyTech: Solid state drives (SSDs), despite a rough economy, have carved out a solid niche, thanks to plummeting NAND prices and the promise of improved reliability and performance. With the upcoming Windows 7 promising an even sweeter boost for flash-drive equipped PCs, it seems a good time for the disk hard drive alternative.

Now SanDisk Corp., a major player in the flash drive market, has unveiled a new file system fine-tuned for flash drive performance. The new system ExtremeFFS, according to SanDisk, offers 100 times faster random write speeds. The system is set to ship on SanDisk products in 2009.

SanDisk has also created two new metrics -- vRPM and LDE -- as part of its solid state campaign. The vRPM measure details performance between a SSD and a hard disk drive (HDD) or another SSD. The LDE metric measures drive lifespan. SanDisk believes both metrics will help it show off its new file system.

According to SanDisk, the new file system and new benchmarks are "critical" to understanding and implementing solid performance in Windows Vista. Rich Heye, senior vice president and general manager for SanDisk's Solid-State Drive (SSD) Business Unit remarked, "SSDs will revolutionize client storage, but we need new benchmarks that allow them to be treated differently than HDDs."

SanDisk has worked on flash memory file systems since 1994, when it debuted the TrueFFS file system. The file system was used on mobile devices and incorporated into Windows at one point.

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