SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Sprandom - A fast method to reduce the random preconditioning time of SSDs from days to hours.
Abstract
Learning Objectives
Understand the purpose of random write preconditioning. Understand how we can achieve steady state preconditioning with only one physical drive write. Understand how the Flexible IO Tester (FIO) can be used to create the random preconditioning state. Learn more about Overprovisioning, Write Amp, and random preconditioning in solid state drives.
Related Sessions
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.
Host Management of NVM Express™ Exported NVM Subsystems in PCIe™ SSDs
This presentation explains how an NVMe™ PCIe SSD supporting multiple NVMe controllers can be used to create and migrate virtual NVMe SSDs (i.e., Exported NVM Subsystems). The commands used by a host managing these virtual SSDs are fully illustrated using animation and demonstrates the interoperability between different SSD vendors during migration. Come and see how the virtual NVMe SSD is abstracted from the underlying NVMe SSD for the migrating Virtual Machine.
