LSI SHIELD Advanced Error Correction Significantly Increases Life Cycle of 3rd Gen LSI SSDs – FMS 2013 Update

Today at FMS 2013, Monika Kloudova of LSI demonstrated LSI’s new SHIELD Advanced Error Correction technology which has the ability to significantly increase the life cycle of LSI next generation SSDs.  For those really confused when it comes to error correction, let’s just say that all SSDs, just like all hard drives, encounter errors.  As the storage medium grows older with use, errors become more frequent and error correction has the ability to increase the hardware’s life significanlty.

Typically, SSDs use BCH error correction, although there is also hard LDPC.  LSI now enters the mix with SHIELD advanced error correction for their 3rd generation controllers (we can’t say Griffin) that appears to surpass the error correction of both BCH and hard LDPC significantly.  In fact, the demonstration utilized an SSD containing 3k P/E memory and both BCH and hard LDPC couldn’t surpass the 8k mark in the demonstration.  LSI’s SHIELD, on the other hand, met the 18k mark and Ms Kloudova said that it would surpass the 18k mark significantly, except that was as high as the demonstration could logically display.

The downside for the LSI SandForce crowd is that it is ONLY for newer generation LSI SandForce SSDs and really wouldn’t affect consumers that much for the most part, in any case.  The upside just may be huge for business and enterprise use however.