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SanDisk Shipping New G3 SSD With ExtremeFFS

By - Source: Tom's Hardware US | B 37 comments

It's Extreme, FFS!

Flash memory company SanDisk is looking to be more than SD and CF cards. SanDisk announced that it is now shipping its G3 Solid State Drives to retailers in North America and Europe.

On the performance front, the G3 boasts sequential performance of up to 220MB/sec read speed and up to 120MB/sec write speed, which the company likes to describe as "twice as fast as a 7,200 RPM HDD." Those running Windows 7 will appreciate that the G3 supports the TRIM command.

SanDisk bills the G3 as a "rugged drive" that can endure up to 80TB of data written to it over its lifetime. Perhaps more unique to the G3 is SanDisk's file system technology for SSDs, which it calls the ExtremeFFS, or Extreme Flash File System.

The memory company explained, "ExtremeFFS incorporates a fully non-blocking architecture in which all of the NAND channels can behave independently, with some reading while others are writing and garbage collecting. Another key element of ExtremeFFS is usage-based content localization, which allows the advanced flash management system to 'learn' user patterns and over time localize data to maximize the product’s performance and endurance."

SanDisk previously said that this technology could result in improvement in random write performance by up to 100 times in best case scenarios. In the G3 announcement, however, SanDisk said that ExtremeFFS has the "potential to accelerate random write performance and thus extend the endurance of SanDisk G3 SSDs…"

SanDisk G3 SSD is available now in U.S. and UK e-commerce sites in 60GB and 120GB capacities with prices of $229.99 and $399.99 respectively. The drive will be available at retailers in North America and Europe soon.

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Top Comments
  • 20 Hide
    drowned , February 25, 2010 4:13 AM
    Like all SSDs, it looks good on paper but time will tell how truly consistent it is on the long term.
Other Comments
  • 20 Hide
    drowned , February 25, 2010 4:13 AM
    Like all SSDs, it looks good on paper but time will tell how truly consistent it is on the long term.
  • 5 Hide
    enzo matrix , February 25, 2010 4:14 AM
    Or I could get an OCZ vertex for less...
  • Display all 37 comments.
  • -1 Hide
    anamaniac , February 25, 2010 4:21 AM
    Or, how about a 22nm Gen 3 512GB SLC x35-e from Intel being named the FFS?
    TI think only such a drive would deserve such a name, not some junk like these...
  • -1 Hide
    micky_lund , February 25, 2010 4:55 AM
    ahhh...it'll probably be as useless as their U3 USB drives...damn i hate the loading on old computers (not mine, but still)
  • 1 Hide
    Gin Fushicho , February 25, 2010 5:22 AM
    Price is a LITTLE better.
  • -5 Hide
    back_by_demand , February 25, 2010 6:41 AM
    LOL FFS
    For F**ks Sake!!!
  • 1 Hide
    back_by_demand , February 25, 2010 10:25 AM
    drownedLike all SSDs, it looks good on paper but time will tell how truly consistent it is on the long term.

    I suppose like all testing there is more than one way to simulate conditions. Instead of running an SSD for an actual 5 years, having one in the field for 6 months but used by millions of people would show up any inherant flaws in the technology. So far I haven't heard any major issues to do with SSD's. Buy one, use one, don't worry about your data. If you put all your faith in HDD's dont forget that they fail too. As long as you do regular backups then all you have to worry about is the manufacturers warranty replacing it.
  • 0 Hide
    rbarone69 , February 25, 2010 11:28 AM
    Trying to rate SSDs in terms of RPMs is pure stupidity. It's apples and oranges.

    Oh well... I see what they are trying to do, they are trying to sell to "the parents" of the geeks and not the geeks themselves... I'll tell you one thing, my father doesn't know the difference between 5400, 7200, 10,000, 15,000 or 40,000 other than the numbers are bigger. He'd say, "I can get a drive that holds 5million photos and hours more video for MUCH cheaper, why would I want this?"

    Oh well... My point is that SSDs are for geeks and businesses at the moment. Until prices come down the general population will opt for more capacity through pure ignorance.

  • 2 Hide
    mavanhel , February 25, 2010 11:35 AM
    Still too expensive for an average user though...Hopefully soon the price will really start to drop.
  • 0 Hide
    bydesign , February 25, 2010 11:53 AM
    @back_by_demand
    You aren't looking; they are not nearly a reliable in the field as normal hard drives, at least not yet. With the current gen this remains to be seen. The reason that you don't hear as much about it is they are in raided in the corporate world failure isn't typically as severe as at home. They also have very low penetration, mainly as result of cost.
  • 3 Hide
    back_by_demand , February 25, 2010 11:59 AM
    rbarone69Trying to rate SSDs in terms of RPMs is pure stupidity. It's apples and oranges.Oh well... I see what they are trying to do, they are trying to sell to "the parents" of the geeks and not the geeks themselves... I'll tell you one thing, my father doesn't know the difference between 5400, 7200, 10,000, 15,000 or 40,000 other than the numbers are bigger. He'd say, "I can get a drive that holds 5million photos and hours more video for MUCH cheaper, why would I want this?"Oh well... My point is that SSDs are for geeks and businesses at the moment. Until prices come down the general population will opt for more capacity through pure ignorance.

    How about telling him that it is twice as fast, makes no noise, no heat and uses much less electric.
  • 2 Hide
    warezme , February 25, 2010 12:07 PM
    All I know is the more vendors and products flood the market..., the better the pricing will get.. wooohoo!
  • 0 Hide
    back_by_demand , February 25, 2010 12:17 PM
    bydesign@back_by_demand You aren't looking; they are not nearly a reliable in the field as normal hard drives, at least not yet. With the current gen this remains to be seen. The reason that you don't hear as much about it is they are in raided in the corporate world failure isn't typically as severe as at home. They also have very low penetration, mainly as result of cost.

    Actually I do hear about corporate use as well as home use. We have an experimental SSD raid being tested where I work and wether it is SSD or HDD if any of them fail the impact is mitigated by that fact of redundancy in the raid setup. Home users dont tend to have raid arrays so disk failure can be more distressing, but as stated earlier, as long as you do regular backup you should have no problems.
    I personally have had several hard drives fail and have been lucky enough to spot the signs of drive failure in advance and not lost data, but have yet to have any SSD problems.
    Watch this space.
  • 2 Hide
    pocketdrummer , February 25, 2010 12:44 PM
    rbarone69Trying to rate SSDs in terms of RPMs is pure stupidity. It's apples and oranges.Oh well... I see what they are trying to do, they are trying to sell to "the parents" of the geeks and not the geeks themselves... I'll tell you one thing, my father doesn't know the difference between 5400, 7200, 10,000, 15,000 or 40,000 other than the numbers are bigger. He'd say, "I can get a drive that holds 5million photos and hours more video for MUCH cheaper, why would I want this?"Oh well... My point is that SSDs are for geeks and businesses at the moment. Until prices come down the general population will opt for more capacity through pure ignorance.


    It's not that everyone is ignorant. Some of us, like me, just don't have $400 to blow on a laughable amount of storage. Even as a boot drive, 120GB is minuscule at best. Until 256GB or even 512GB drives are the norm, many people just can't justify the price. Especially when you consider that you still need that old 7,200 rpm drive to hold the majority of your files (which renders the SSD useless for all but an increase in your page file performance). It's an issue of practicality, not idiocy.
  • 1 Hide
    thackstonns , February 25, 2010 1:14 PM
    back_by_demandHow about telling him that it is twice as fast, makes no noise, no heat and uses much less electric.


    and holds less than 1/10th of the data. I bet if the mechanical harddrive space lowered the capacity back to 60gigs and spin it as fast as a raptor or a 15000 rpm sas drive you would sustain 200MB read. The ssd would still do better I/O. Fact of the matter is I can wait the 1/10th of a second longer to load a program, for 2terabytes more space. Everytime I load a movie its going to take that long anyway because its not going to be stored on the SSD. With 60 gig you would have to install a game, uninstall a game, install a new game. Which pretty much negates any speed increase.
  • 3 Hide
    JohnnyLucky , February 25, 2010 1:35 PM
    I wonder who the actual manufacturer is.
  • 0 Hide
    back_by_demand , February 25, 2010 1:37 PM
    thackstonnsWith 60 gig you would have to install a game, uninstall a game, install a new game. Which pretty much negates any speed increase.

    That is a good point, I have all my games installed on a separate drive anyway. The OS and all programs on the SSD, games on a HDD, files on another, videos and music on 2 more HDDs.
    The majority of the fast SSD stuff is for editting HD video and big-ass RAW pics from the DSLR. !2gb ram means I have switched off my page-file and boot from cold in less than 30 seconds, (including the annoying POST and BIOS splash screens). But benchmarking aside everthing simply feels snappier, the second I replaced the OS HDD with an SSD it felt smoother. I dont feel as if my wallet was raped either as £150 for a 60Gb OCZ Agility was quite reasonable. This depite the fact I have 4 other HDDs in the system. As far as reliability is concerned, I have weighed the factors and the arguement for wear leveling has convinced me that if a sector fails on the SSD the algorithms will seal it off and I can continue to use the drive without worry, but no HDD has convinced me yet that if a sector fails to do anything other buy a new HDD.
  • 0 Hide
    thackstonns , February 25, 2010 1:58 PM
    I admit I would like photoshop and priemer to load faster than they do. But to be honest I usually leave them open. I have 8 gigs of ram and also turned the page file off. I just dont see how it would speed up HD video encoding, you are still pulling off a slower hard drive. I havent used a pc that has an ssd, so I am by no means even qualified to guess at the performance. But I dont have one because everything I use media wise has to be on an old mechanical drive anyway. I want an ssd I think I need an ssd, but everytime I go to buy one I end up with another terabyte drive instead. As far as reads and writes go, my Samsungs f3 drives do pretty well in raid. When they get cheaper and bigger maybe.
  • 1 Hide
    sliem , February 25, 2010 2:26 PM
    "It's Extreme, FFS!"
  • 1 Hide
    miloo , February 25, 2010 3:30 PM
    still cant afford to get one ~
    hopefully next year they can bring down the price ~
    and we can get a cheaper laptop with SSD inside ^_^
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