Sandisk making flash disks faster

[Rik]

El Reg reports that:

SanDisk has unveiled faster notebook flash SSDs using its ExtremeFFS technology and with a new controller, a day after attacking the netbook market.

This is what SanDisk hope will start making inroads into notebook hard drive displacement.

The SATA 7000 family consists of C25-G3 (third generation 2.5-inch form factor) and C18-G3 (third generation 1.8-inch form factor) drives with 60, 120 or 240GB capacities. They use the SATA II (3Gbit/s interface) and are designed as drop-in replacements for existing notebook hard disk drives HDDs).

Rich Heye, SAnDisk's SVP and general manager for its SSD business unit, said: "Three key features developed by SanDisk enable this new design: a new SSD algorithm called ExtremeFFS allows random write performance to potentially improve by as much as 100 times over conventional algorithms; reliable 43nm multi-level cell (MLC) all bit-line (ABL) NAND flash; and SanDisk's new SSD controller, which ties together the NAND and the algorithm."

SanDisk says these SSDs are more than five times faster than the fastest 7,200rpm HDDs and more than twice as fast as SSDs shipping in 2008, clocking in at 40,000 vRPM1 and having anticipated performance of 200MB/sec (sustained) reads and 140MB/sec (sustained) writes.

This could be very interesting for all of us as prices fall.

[Simon]

Hopefully they'll be available for my next upgrade, in about three years time. 

[Sebby]

This really is the future of computing, I think. The hard drive is a bottleneck at the moment.

[Rik]

It's always been the way, Seb, drives get faster, but the processors and RAM get faster at a faster pace. I can remember when we used to use RAM disks because of the disparity, so this is a natural progression to me.