SanDisk today announced ExtremeFFS, a technology the company claims will be able to boost the speed of solid-state drives significantly. According to SanDisk, the new technology avoids tying the location of data to physical space by altering its position on the drive to the place where it will be most efficient.

SanDisk hasn't announced any release dates or products that will carry the technology, but it expect products to begin shipping next year. SanDisk predicts next year's drives will be as much as six times faster than standard notebook hard drives, and four times faster than existing SSDs.

SanDisk also introduced two metrics: vRPM and LDE - that can help end-users evaluate SSDs. vRPM 9Virtual RPM) enables comparisons in performance between an SSD and a hard disk drive (HDD) or another SSD, and LDE calculates the lifespan of a solid-state drive. The LDE specification has been submitted to the JEDEC standards body as a proposed standard.

SanDisk will spec LDE on its future PC SSD products and "we strongly encourage others to follow SanDisk's lead," said Rich Heye, the senior vice president and general manager responsible for SanDisk's SSD unit.