Sandisk has released SPRandom, a new open source tool designed to reduce the time required to prepare high-capacity drives for steady state, where operations mimic real-world conditions. As SSD capacities continue to scale in the AI era, SPRandom enables faster testing, qualification, and deployment by reducing preconditioning time by up to 90%¹.
Enterprise SSD capacities are reaching milestone capacities of 256TB and beyond. Sandisk has unveiled its own drives featuring breakthrough capacity, performance, and power efficiency made possible by its enterprise-grade UltraQLCTM platform. In delivering these new high-capacity drives, the company found that traditional preconditioning methods have become a bottleneck for customers. Preconditioning is essential to ensure predictable performance under real workloads, but conventional approaches can take more than 144 hours for a 128TB SSD. SPRandom addresses this challenge by reducing preconditioning time to just over six hours¹, helping enterprises keep pace with AI-driven and data-intensive workloads.
“The time needed for preconditioning high-capacity drives has become a real pain point,” said Steven Sprouse, Distinguished Engineer, Systems Design Engineering, Sandisk. “Inspired by our open industry approach with the Open Compute Project, we developed SPRandom to significantly speed up the preconditioning process with an innovative, standardised approach available to the industry.”
Sandisk developed and contributed SPRandom via open source to the Flexible IO Tester FIO tool ². SPRandom is designed to support a wide range of drives and is customisable for additional flexibility.
Key benefits of SPRandom include:
- Significantly reduced SSD preconditioning times, reducing preparation by up to 90%
- Designed for SSDs with capacities of 128TB, 256TB, and beyond
- Standardised approach working across NVMe, SAS, and SATA SSDs
- Based on a pseudo-random preconditioning method integrated with Flexible I/O Tester (fio)
- Better endurance evaluation during qualification and validation
¹ According to testing conducted by the Open Composible Compatibility Lab https://www.opencomposable.com
² SPRandom is available as a fully integrated feature on fio version 3.41*. (*available in GitHub: https://github.com/axboe/fio/releases)
