Indilinx has been one of the more successful manufacturers of Solid State controllers over the last year. The company’s Barefoot controller can be found in many different SSDs at several companies and with the latest firmware upgrades Barefoot has both features and performance to match and beat the competition. There is trouble at Indilinx though. The successor to Barefoot, which will be the first SSD controller to support SATA 6Gb/s looks to be delayed.
Indilinx “Jet Stream”, as the Solid State controller has been dubbed has been in development over a year now and beside the support for the new storage interface Jet Stream also supports DDR NAND, a memory technology recently presented by among others Samsung.
The solid state controller is said to be made with 65nm technology, Barefoot used 90nm tech, and will support capacities up to 1TB.
Test versions of the Jet Stream controller was supposed to start shipping to Indilinx partners today, but it looks like this won’t happen until the next quarter. We don’t know, but maybe this is why OCZ Technology, Indilinx biggest partners, recently decided to start working with competitor SandForce.
This is of course bad news for use consumers too, as we are all eagerly awaiting the next generation of solid state technology. We have already seen other actors make progress here though meaning the greatest loss is with Indilinx more than anyone else.
