To improve the performance and reliability of solid-state drives (SSD), SanDisk Corp. on Wednesday announced an advanced flash file management system called ExtremeFFS system.

Don Barnetson, senior director of marketing at the Milpitas, Calif.-based memory maker's SSD business unit, said ExtremeFFS should boost the speed of writing common types of data to SSDs by as much as 100 times, thereby dramatically improving two of the main weaknesses of SSDs.

While SSDs are fast at writing large files and at reading either large or small files, they tend to be far slower than mechanical hard drives at storing small slices of data, what Barnetson called "random writes." ExtremeFFS uses a "page-based algorithm" that allows the drive to write data where it is "most convenient and efficient."

According to Barnetson, ExtremeFFS also allows data to be written to disk without erasing and rewriting nearby stored data. That, along with the ability to move data around to ensure that the physical memory blocks wear out evenly, would boost the longevity of SanDisk SSDs.

Unveiling the technology at Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), taking place in Los Angeles this week, SanDisk said the new ExtremeFFS system, which will ship in SanDisk products next year, "has the potential to accelerate random write speeds over existing systems."