Communications of the ACM
Buckle p--Ssds Are About to Get Three Times Faster
Researchers say a firmware patch can improve write speeds on solid-state drives by as much as 300 percent.
Credit: LaCie
Chuo University researchers led by professor Ken Takeuchi say they have developed technology that improves write speeds on solid-state drives (SSDs) by 300 percent using a firmware patch.
They say the technology can solve performance bottlenecks, such as garbage collection, which are commonly associated with SSDs.
Although garbage collection is much faster than defragmenting a conventional mechanical drive, it can still cause performance bottlenecks, especially on drives that receive a lot of write options. The new technology involves more control over where the data is written so fewer copying operations need to be performed before the block can be erased.
During testing, the researchers say the proposed algorithm increased write speeds by 300 percent and reduced the number of write and erase cycles by more than 50 percent.
Although most of the speed improvements for SSDs generally involve the data connection used by the drive, other ways to increase performance times include an IBM effort to place SSDs in DIMM slots, so the SSDs can use the system's much faster memory channel rather than its PCI bus.
From InfoWorld
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