Skip to main content

Sandisk, the New Cloud Storage God with ExtremeFFS?








This battleground is getting hotter and hotter. Storage vendor SanDisk unveils its secret juice of ExtremeFFS.

El Reg reporting:

The flash is multi-threaded, incorporating a non-blocking architecture, so that the 4 to 10 channels from the controller to the NAND chips can be doing different things simultaneously. They can be used for reading, writing or garbage collection.

Think of garbage collection as being akin to checking the bookshelf and removing unwanted books thus creating empty space. Or think of the Wallace and Grommit cartoon where new railway track is continuously being laid down in front of a speeding locomotive. That's what the garbage collection does; create fresh track for the speeding (writing) locomotive by pulling up used track from behind the train.

So there are always, or should always be, empty pages for small random writes to be written into quickly without having to do an erase before the write. That's been done already in the background. Without this page-based algorithm every random write would need a block-level operation and take 100 milliseconds instead of, for example, one.

In effect, SanDisk has accelerated random writes by avoiding the need to erase flash for the write data before writing it.

Sequential writes are not accelerated because they operate at block level already as the files are typically large, images from digital cameras, etc.

SanDisk has also added a process whereby pages that are often accessed sequentially are placed contiguously so that their access is speeded up.

The net effect of ExtremeFFS according to SanDisk is that SSDs are now much more suitable for Windows use because the thousands and thousands of small writes, sub-block size, that Windows makes are accelerated through the new page-level algorithm. This should show up as greatly improved benchmarks for Windows SSD-using systems


Source
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus
Post a Comment
Read more

Virtualization: GlassHouse hopes to cash in with its IPO!

GlassHouse Technologies Inc. on Tuesday registered to raise as much as $100 million in an initial public offering that, despite the company's financial losses, could prove a hit with investors drawn to its focus on "virtualization" technology. The Framingham, Mass., company offers consulting services for companies that use virtualization software to improve the performance of corporate servers and cut costs in their data centers. GlassHouse also provides Internet-based data storage. "Software-as-a-service," or SaaS, companies and vendors of virtualization products have proved popular among investors in recent years as corporate customers seek alternatives to conventional packaged software. GlassHouse, with roots in both sectors, will test the strength of that interest, said Peter Falvey, managing director with Boston investment bank Revolution Partners. "It will be a bit of a bell weather," he says. "It's not as though it's the 15th SaaS m...
Post a Comment
Read more