News

posted on 25 July 2008 14:14

Flash chips have a known number of write cycles but solid state drives (SSD) do not. This could hinder their take-up.

An SSD is a controller with aggregated NAND chips behind it. Different controllers have different techniques for maximising the number of write cycles they can support, such as wear leveling algorithms. There is no standard measure of SSD write cycle endurance. Without such a measure it will be impossible to compare the write cycle endurance of different SSDs.

The JEDEC (Joint Electron Devices Engineering Council) standards group has formed a sub-committee to address this.

SanDisk is proposing its LDE (Long-term Data Endurance) approach for this which aims to quantify the total number of terabytes that can be written to an SSD.

Download a SanDisk presentation on LDE from the Forward Insights website here.

The expectation is that a metric ought to be deliverable next year.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}