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.