Diskeeper launches solid state drive optimiser

SSD performance can drop by as much as 80 per cent in the first six months

Storage maintenance firm Diskeeper has unveiled what it claims is the first optimiser designed exclusively for solid state drives (SSDs), promising faster performance and extended lifespan.

SSDs are becoming increasingly popular in netbooks and high application load server environments, but Diskeeper reckons that many of these drives experience a deterioration in performance by as much as 80 per cent over the first six months, and possess a shorter lifespan then their traditional platter-based counterparts.

SSD manufacturers have overcome some of these issues with the development of drive controllers that better manage the read and write balancing across the drive, but Diskeeper hopes to extend this even further.

The company's HyperFast technology aims to solve these issues by intelligently eliminating performance-degrading free space fragmentation, and reducing the aggregate erase-write cycles that the SSD would otherwise incur during normal use.

HyperFast essentially forces the file system to write sequentially rather than randomly, thereby ensuring peak performance, according to the firm.

Diskeeper said that this will also cause typical use to generate less erase-write activity and increase longevity.

The system uses Diskeeper's existing InvisiTasking processing platform to optimise the drive automatically in real time, with no overhead or resource conflict.

The company's own internal benchmarks of an Apacer 8GB SSD showed that sequential read speeds improved by a factor of 5.9, sequential write speeds by 19.5, random reads by 3.9 and random writes by 9.0.

HyperFast is available as an additional technology with the Diskeeper 2009 application suite.