SanDisk Shipping New G3 SSD With ExtremeFFS

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.