Japanese middleware for SSDs promises significant speed gains in write actions

Japanese researchers say they have been able to increase write speeds by up to 300 percent with the help of changes to the middleware for driving SSDs. Also, the software could significantly reduce power consumption and the number of write/erase cycles.

This is reported by the Japanese media organization Nikkei. Researchers at Chuo University say they have added a so-called LBA scrambler to the SSD control. This software component communicates with the flash translation layer of the SSD. This converts logical addressing of the used file system to physical addressing.

By adjusting the logical addressing for writes via the LBA scrambler, data must be written to an SSD more efficiently because there is less fragmentation. Data is written to a fragmented page of a memory block that will be erased by the garbage collection mechanism of the SSD firmware. This reduces the number of write/erase cycles required.

According to the researchers, applying LBA scrambler in simulations leads to 300 percent speed gains in write actions, depending on the application. It could also reduce power consumption by up to 60 percent and reduce write/erase cycles by 55 percent. The latter benefits the life of a solid state disk. The implementation of the LBA scrambler middleware could also be applied to existing SSDs.