In 2009, SanDisk will begin deploying flash management systems capable of accelerating SSD random write speeds by up to 100 times compared to the technology we have today, the company revealed this week during the WinHEC conference held in Los Angeles.

The announcement was made by Rich Heye, senior vice president and general manager for SanDisk’s Solid-State Drive (SSD) Business Unit, who officially introduced the ExtremeFFS flash file management system, along with two metrics: vRPM, which allows users to make comparisons between an SSD and a HDD or another SSD; and LDE, which calculates the lifespan of an SSD.

The ExtremeFFS brings significant improvements in performance and reliability for consumer applications, and was needed in order to allow SSDs to perform optimally in Windows Vista, the company explained.

“SSDs will revolutionize client storage, but we need new benchmarks to allow them to be treated differently than HDDs,” Heye explained.

The new flash management system operates on a page-based algorithm as follows: when a sector of data is written, the SSD puts it where it is most convenient and efficient, the company explained. This will result in an improved random write performance, as well as endurance.

SanDisk explained that the ExtremeFFS technology incorporates a non-blocking architecture with independent NAND channels (while some do the reading, others do the writing and the garbage collecting).

This is an upgrade to the TrueFFS system SanDisk introduced 14 years ago, which was more suitable for older versions of the operating system.