As the performance of solid-state disk (SSD) continues to improve, manufacturers are squeezing more out of existing hard-disk (HDD) technology.

Seagate has claimed it has made the world’s fastest, greenest drive ­ – the Savvio 15K.2 HDD. In the same week, however, Flash drive maker Sandisk announced that it can make SSDs a hundred times quicker than anything else available.

Its latest version of old-style hard-disk technology spins at 15,000 revolutions per minute.
Seagate’s marketing strategist, Sherman Black, insisted that system builders are still better off using the old technology to solve the storage problems of big companies.

“In today’s enterprise, they want to cut their power and cooling costs,” he said, “but they also want to satisfy growing application performance needs and compliance regulations.”

He argued that Seagate’s unified storage architecture is the best way to meet these needs. Not true, said a spokesman for Sandisk, which is pioneering the new SSD technology.

Where is the complexity, when the new technology works 100 times faster? asked Doreet Oren, director of product marketing at Sandisk. Besides, the newer storage technology works in a more efficient way with applications, making read and write transactions less painful.

“The new generation technology does away with block-based mapping, which traditionally hurts random write-in computing applications,” said Oren. “Usage patterns in full-featured client operating systems show that most writes are random.”
The mismatch to block size is significant, he said. Computing applications need new algorithms, and Sandisk’s Extreme FFS SSD will be well placed to meet that requirement.

Extreme FFS uses a page-based algorithm, so there would be no fixed coupling between the physical and logical location of data. When a block of data is written, the SSD puts it where it is most efficient, resulting in a theoretical improvement of 100 times faster performance.

Small-form factor hard disks are still the technology of choice for enterprises, said John Rydning, IDC research director for hard-disk drives. “We expect shipments of small-form factor enterprise-class drives into enterprise storage solutions to overtake traditional 3.5in enterprise class drives next year.”