SSD drives came to the computing scene with a bang and have taken over the consumer market with ease, the reasons being fast speed and myriad of advantages when compared with traditional hard drives. SSDs are the choice when it comes to storing data for quick retrieval. However, this technology is still evolving and as is with any new technology, it comes with some glitches that need to be fixed. Apparently there is a flaw with their NAND chips which translates into the fact that these drives are not very good when it comes to over-writing data.
How do the current SSDs work? The data is saved to the clean/unwritten part of your drive while the remainder part is formatted. Eventually your drive will become fragmented resulting in poor performance over time. Such working principle also reduces the life span of your SSD. This is where the team from Japan’s Chuo University comes in. The team decided to do something about these flaws and eventually came up with a fix to solve these issues. The technology (software fix) that they have come up with allows for the SSDs to overwrite data without any issue and as a result work faster, more efficiently and increases life span.
The team employed a ‘logical block address scrambler’; which prevents the drive from using the clean part of the drive unless it is a crucial requirement and forced the drive to make use of block that has been erased and will be combined in the next sweep. This means fragmentation doesn’t occur and less copying of files is involved. Since the file copying processes in the background cease; the SSD becomes faster and also reduces the amount of power required by the drive.
The tests of this new technology have proven to be more than just successful; the team saw an increase in drive’s speed by 300 % and an energy consumption decrease of 60%. With this technology the data transfer rate occurs at 1.5GB/sec. For all those who are worried that their SSD drives will have to be replaces with these new technology infused SSDs; did you miss the part where we stated that it is a software technology? Yes, this means that you can download and install it once it is made available to the consumers – which we hope and pray happens soon enough!
