The JEDEC Solid State Technology Association announced today that its standards subcommittee has released two new standards for evaluating the reliability and endurance of solid-state drives. As more SSDs appear on the market, JEDEC hopes to use the new standards to "reduce market confusion, facilitate broad adoption and alleviate product quality and reliability concerns." This should be a benefit to consumers looking to compare SSDs from different manufacturers and make purchasing decisions that accurately meet their needs.
The new system will replace the previous method of testing "mean time between failure" with two new metrics: JESD218 Solid-State Drive Requirements and Endurance Test Method and JESD219 Solid-State Drive Endurance Workloads. Further class ratings will be set to differentiate between consumer and enterprise levels of performance. JEDEC's comprehensive approach to defining these performance factors "will go a long way towards enabling market confidence in SSDs," said Scott Graham, Vice-Chairman of the JC-64.8 flash memory subcommittee. A solid-state drive tutorial is planned for October 5th in San Jose to help with introducing and implementing the new standards.