SSD Breakthrough Could Mean Huge Speed Boosts For All SSD Drives!
Peter Donnell / 10 years ago
Good news everyone! Recent innovations in SSD technology could soon bring huge benefits to all SSD owners, without the need to upgrade their hardware. SSD’s are inherently fast compared to mechanical drives, but the hardware has always suffered from major issues in how the memory is handled. The current format means that data cannot be overwritten onto the NAND chips, so files have to be written to a clean area of the drive whist the old data is formatted. Over time this causes fragmented data and lowers the lifespan and performance of the drive over time, which is obviously not a good thing.
A development team at Chuo University have overcome the issue that has forever plagued SSD technology with their brand new middlewear for SSD drives, which they officially unveiled at the 2014 IEEE International Memory Workshop in Taipei. This middlewear controls how data is written to and stored on the device, but the new version utilizes something called “logical block address scrambler” that prevents data being written to a new ‘page’ on the device unless absolutely required, storing the data in a bock to be erased and consolidated in the next weep.
So what does this mean? Put simply the drive has to do much less behind-the-scenes file copying, meaning performance from idle is improved because the drive isn’t busy doing internal copy tasks, and the drives lifespan is improved as it has to perform fewer write operations to complete each task. Drives tested wrote data 55% less often, speed increases of up to 300% were recorded and 60% less power was used! that means that high-end devices that can reach 500MB/s could reach 1.5GB/s.
Best of all, this is just a software fix, nothing more. No doubt many other developers are going to test the limits of this middlewear, but huge performance increases could be just a firmware update away for all of us, so you may want to hold out for more news before purchasing your next SSD.
Thank you Neowin for providing us with this information.
