SSD Firmware Breakthrough

[Gman496]

New developments in the way SSD drives work have been announced and could well be available as a firmware update for all SSD drives including existing ones. Might be worth keeping an eye out for any updates your SSD drive manufacturers release.

A Japanese research team developed a technology to drastically improve the writing speed, power efficiency and cycling capability (product life) of a storage device based on NAND flash memory (SSD).

With NAND flash memory, it is not possible to overwrite data on the same memory area, making it necessary to write data on a different area and, then, invalidate the old area. As a result, data is fragmented, increasing invalid area and decreasing storage capacity. Therefore, NAND flash memories carry out "garbage collection," which rearranges fragmented data in a continuous way and erases blocks of invalid area. This process takes 100ms or longer, drastically decreasing the writing speed of SSD.

Basically this is what it's all about and might save you reading all the bumf

Short Version:

instead of writing data on a new blank page, data is written on a fragmented page located in the block to be erased next. As a result, the ratio of invalid pages in the block to be erased increases, reducing the number of valid pages that need to be copied to another area at the time of garbage collection.

In a simulation, the research team confirmed that the new technology improves the writing speed of SSD by up to 300% and reduces power consumption by up to 60% and the number of write/erase cycles by up to 55%, increasing product life. Because, with the new method, it is not necessary to make any changes to NAND flash memory, and the method is completed within the middleware, it can be applied to existing SSDs as it is.

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