SanDisk is soon to announce new technology needed for its solid state drives to take on hard disk drive storage.

SSDs are appearing in netbooks and notebooks and in enterprise storage arrays where they provide accelerated I/O, either as a separate tier of flash storage or as a flash cache accelerating the array controller’s operations. But the appeal of flash SSD technology is limited because today’s NAND chips don’t have enough capacity, making them expensive. Writes take too long, being slower than reads, particularly random writes, and the write cycle endurance is too short with the flash wearing out after a set number of write cycles.

SanDisk thinks it can solve all three problems. By adding bits to a NAND cell it can increase capacity with 2-bit multi-level cell (2x MLC) technology here and higher-capacity 3- and 4-bit MLC coming. It has also come up with its Extreme Flash File System (ExtremeFFS) to accelerate random write speed by up to 100 times and so be much closer to sequential write speed.

But it is not enough. SanDisk’s Senior Director of Marketing, Don Barnetson, revealed this at a Tokyo press conference on 27th November, saying: “We need one more step of improvement besides ExtremeFFS.” He didn’t say what that was but he did say: “Please wait a little while for our announcement … We are preparing a technology to solve these issues.”