Accelerate SSD Preconditioning with Sprandom
Sprandom is Sandisk’s breakthrough method for preparing ultra-high-capacity SSDs in record time. Cut preconditioning from days to hours and accelerate your development and qualification process.
What is Sprandom?
Sprandom is a new methodology for preconditioning developed by Sandisk that provides a solution for a prevalent problem in the solid state storage landscape.
As SSD capacities reach 128TB, 256TB, and beyond, traditional preconditioning methods have become a major bottleneck. Preconditioning helps ensure drives perform predictably under real workloads, but conventional approaches can take 144+ hours for a 128TB SSD. Sprandom changes that. With Sandisk’s open-source contribution to the Flexible IO Tester (FIO) Tool, Sprandom prepares drives in just over 6 hours, enabling faster testing, qualification, and deployment.
Why Do We Precondition Drives?
To avoid surprises and measure sustained performance, drives must be preconditioned to a steady state, where operations mimic real-world conditions like garbage collection and NAND management. This process is essential for accurate benchmarking and compliance with the SNIA Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification.
The challenge? As capacities grow, preconditioning times balloon from hours to days or even weeks. Sprandom solves this by reducing preconditioning time by up to 90%, helping enterprises keep pace with AI and data-intensive workloads.
Accurate representation of long term drive performance
Forces overprovisioning and active garbage collection during benchmarking
Allows for observation of media capabilities
Shows controller efficiency and effectiveness
How Does Sprandom Work?
Sprandom uses a calculated pseudo-random write pattern to create the desired internal state in a single pass at near maximum speed. Here’s how it works via a visual representation of the process:
Input: User capacity and over-provisioning (OP) data.
Calculation: Sprandom determines physical capacity and OP distribution.
Execution: Generates a write pattern that achieves steady state in one pass.
Testing: Drive performs steady state immediately.
Integrated into the widely used Flexible IO Tester (FIO), Sprandom is open-source and ready for broad adoption across any SSD.
Key Benefits of Sprandom
Save time
- Precondition drives up to 90% faster.
Standardized approach
- Works across NVMe, SAS, and SATA SSDs.
Future-ready
- Designed for SSDs with capacities 128TB, 256TB, and beyond.
Industry integration
- Available in FIO for broad adoption.
For decades, SSD preconditioning hasn’t changed—until now. Sprandom is one of the first major improvements, built for the AI era and ultra-high-capacity storage demands.
