New SSD entrant Anobit promises longer SSD lifespan

Israeli-based Anobit announced new SSD drives based on their own Memory Signal Processor controller, which extends MLC NAND lifespan through a special error-correction algorithm. Anobit’s VP of Biz Dev, Gilad Engel, touted the drives’ capabilities:

Engel said the 200GB Genesis SSD can handle 2TB worth of data writes per day for five years, and the 400GB SSD can sustain 4TB of writes per day. Both drives can achieve a write rate of 20,000 I/Os per second and a read rate of 30,000 IOPS, according to Engel.

Anobit’s secret sauce, as i understand it, is its superior ability to discern signal out of gradually degrading NAND memory, which in turn reduces reliance on error correcting overhead.

The overhead for hardware-based signal decoding is relatively high, with some NAND flash vendors allocating up to 7.5% of the flash chip as spare area for ECC. Increasing the ECC hardware decoding capability not only increases the overhead further, but the effectiveness also declines with NAND’s decreasing signal-to-noise ratio[...]

More on the Anobit offerings over at Computer World…