Currently available SSD drives are marketed as having significant advantages over mechanical spinning hard drives; they produce less heat, use less power and would seemingly be less prone to failure. However, in reality they were found to under-perform compared to standard mechanical HDDs when they were first widely used in notebooks.
They tend to be slower at writing small amounts of data to the memory, while performing quite well with large files. This isn't very convenient for excessive use. In addition to announcing ExtremeFSS, SanDisk also pushed for the industry to adopt a few helpful metrics. Long-term Data Endurance (LDE) for example would be a measure of the amount of data that could be written to an SSD before it fails.
As an example, a drive with a value of 40 TBW (terabytes written) would last for 11 years at an average of 10GB per day. Barnetson suggested that an LDE measure would be similar to an MPG (miles-per-gallon) measure for a car. A second metric SanDisk proposes is "virtual rpm," which would measure how well the SSD compares to a mechanical drive at a certain speed (measured in revolutions per minute, or RPM).
A third proposal from SanDisk was for a SMART-like system for SSD drives to help predict failure in adequate time to rescue data.
Written by: James Delahunty @ 6 Nov 2008 19:12
