Sprandom - A Fast Method to Reduce the Random Preconditioning Time of SSDs from Days to Hours

As SSD capacities increase beyond 16TB, the time to randomly precondition these drives has also increased from several hours to several days. Traditional methods involve a sequential write followed by multiple random writes to reach a steady state. We present Sprandom (SanDisk Pseudo Random) – a novel approach to random preconditioning that uses the Flexible I/O Tester (fio) to achieve near steady-state performance with just a single physical drive write. Our experiments show that using the Sprandom method, the random preconditioning time of large (> 64TB) drives can be reduced from days to hours.