Japanese Develop Technique to Increase SSD performance by 300%

Japanese researcher claim to have developed a technique which increases read & write performance upto 300%. Their method also decreases power consumption and also decreases the amount of write and erase cycles. The Scientist of the Chuo University announced their method at the 2014 IEEE International Memory Workshop (IMW), an international academic conference on semiconductor memory technology, which took place last week in Taipei, Taiwan.

  

 If this technique really works fine then the days are not far that we will be able to write or read large amount of data in no time. we will have the ever fastest working storage devices. The method of Japanese researchers is based on NAND memory that doesn't allow to overwrite the same memory area. To rewrite the same written area, first written memory should be cleaned. And this cleaning process is very time consuming. That's why SSD tries to write free blocks first. This technique leads to increase in data fragmentation. and also this process require more head cycles. SSDs deals with this problem using technique called "Garbage Collection". this process defregment the data which rearranges the data in sequence so that it can be read sequentially and also erases the written data that is no longer in use. All these commands take 100ms or longer which decreases the performance of the SSD, the Japanese researchers argue.

The Japanese researchers claim to have developed way that prevents fragmentation of data. They have built up a method called "LBA (logical Block Address) Scrambler" which resides between the filesystem and SSD controller.The LBA scrambler converts the logical addresses of data being written to reduce the effect of fragmentation.

Specifically, instead of writing data on a new blank page (see image above), data is written on a fragmented page located in the block to be erased next. As a result, the ratio of invalid pages in the block to be erased increases, reducing the number of valid pages that need to be copied to another area at the time of garbage collection.

When the method is tested they found that using this method they increased the performance of SSD by 300% and power consumption is also decreases up to 60%. This method also decreases the read/write cycles upto 50% and hence due to less read/write cycles the life of SSD also gets increased.

Source : Myce