SanDisk announced on Wednesday a technology that the company describes as being able to boost the speed of solid-state drives significantly. This is called ExtremeFFS, and it avoids tying the location of data to physical space by altering its position on the drive to the place where it will be most efficient. Unfortunately, a release date has yet to be announced, but the product will most likely be released next year.

SanDisk also introduced two metrics: vRPM and LDE, which help users evaluate SSDs (solid-state drives). The Virtual RPM (vRPM) enables comparisons in performance between an SSD and a hard disk drive or another SSD, while LDE calculates the lifespan of a solid-state drive. The metrics were introduced in order to help overcome lingering customer concern over SSD performance and endurance. SanDisk already submitted a proposal to JEDEC, which develops standards for the SSD industry. In their attempt to give real-time wear data to users, SanDisk is also supporting the adoption of a third industry metric.

The new technology from SanDisk, which claims to boost the speed of solid-state drives significantly, is using a version of TrueFFS technology that SanDisk acquired when it bought the flash technology company M-systems. In order to write a data to a nonempty flash sector, a user must erase that sector and then write to the newly empty spot.

That’s why the speed is affected, because the flash drive needs two operations to complete the task. Furthermore, flash drives’ speeds are also affected by the amount of software that it takes to actually manage the physical aspects of the technology. Flash is arranged in the typical RAM grid structure, which means that there should be a mechanism for mapping the OS model of filesystem locations onto the physical flash hardware.