So SSDs are about to get way better

[EssArrBee]

Firmware Breakthrough for SSDs

 

Some nice Japanese researchers found out how to increase speed and overall life of SSDs by solving the major issues with write to the drive.

 

Basic idea is that you cannot overwrite the drives if data occupies the space you want to write to. You have to write to a different unoccupied area and then mark the other data as invalid or ready for deletion, then write the new data to that sector which creates fragmentation. This solves the issue by using a much more efficient algorithm to write new data on already fragmented sectors and comes up with a basic garbage collection system for SSDs.

 

The data is written to the first sector that is marked for deletion instead saving about 55% of writes and increasing overall speed by 300%. I'd say in real world you would only get about 200% increase due to the varied type and size of your writes. Also, SATA 3 is limited to ~600MB/s and the fastest SSDs on the market are ~500MB/s, so 300% increase is ~1.5GB/s. SATA Express (~1.9GB/s limit) will have to be adopted very soon so new drives can be supported.

[phazer11]

So, basically I can turn my SSD into a huge RAM disk? Sounds good to me... 

*Dream Bubble Burst* SATA3 buts its ugly head in my dreams and screams, "No RAM DISK FOR YOUZ!"