SSDs might become a lot more powerful thanks to a new breakthrough

A breakthrough in solid state drive processing means current drives can be boosted 300 per cent faster with 60 per cent better energy efficiency. Current flash drives can’t overwrite data on the same memory area. That means data must be written in a new area before the old is invalidated. The result is fragmented data on the memory. A Japanese research team at Chuo University has cracked the problem for drastically faster write speeds and lower power consumption.

Solid state drives are already one of the fastest storage solutions going around, but a new breakthrough in SSD middleware has the potential to make the drives even faster. Due to the inherent way NAND works, it’s impossible to directly overwrite data stored in areas of memory, so when you write to the drive, it writes the data to a different area first before invalidating the old area. This causes drive fragmentation, which is currently solved through a process called “garbage collection” that rearranges data through a series of writes, slowing down the overall writing speed. A team from Japan’s Chuo University have developed a new technology that partially solves this problem; a problem which has been present in SSD technology since the beginning. The solution is complex, relying on a “logical block address scrambler” to reduce the effects of fragmentation while simultaneously reducing the amount of copies needed during garbage collection.