Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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As SSD capacities increase beyond 16TB, the time to randomly precondition these drives has also increased from several hours to several days. Traditional methods involve a sequential write followed by multiple random writes to reach a steady state. We present Sprandom (SanDisk Pseudo Random) – a novel approach to random preconditioning that uses the Flexible I/O Tester (fio) to achieve near steady-state performance with just a single physical drive write. Our experiments show that using the Sprandom method, the random preconditioning time of large (greater than 64TB) drives can be reduced from days to hours.

Understand the purpose of random write preconditioning. Understand how we can achieve steady state preconditioning with only one physical drive write. Understand how the Flexible IO Tester (FIO) can be used to create the random preconditioning state. Learn more about Overprovisioning, Write Amp, and random preconditioning in solid state drives.
Presented by Steven Sprouse, SanDisk
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