SandForce is the perhaps brightest shining star among SSD developers and now that the controller company has presented its next generation SSD processor it is with some big promises. It says there will be SATA 6.0 Gbps and read/write speeds up to 500 Megabyte per second.
SandForce SF-2000 is the name of the new SSD processor family that will arrive with two members, SF-2500 and SF-2600. Both SSD processors are developed for businesses, but we would not be surprised if these circuits will appear in regular retail drives, although in the enthusiast range.
“We are building on the success of our first generation product now in production with multiple Enterprise OEMs by introducing the SF-2000 family that offers significant feature and performance enhancements for our rapidly expanding customer base of trusted SandForce Driven Enterprise and Industrial SSD manufacturers.”
SandForce SF-2500/2600 comes with SATA 6.0 Gbps interface and will with the patented DuraClass technology be capable of speeds up to 500 MB/s, both when reading and writing data, which can be compared to the 250/170 MB/s Intel promises with its third generation SSDs. At random writes of 4KB files the controller can reach 60,000 IOPS, which isn’t that much higher than Intel’s numbers of 50,000 IOPS, but still market leading.
| SSD Processor: | SF-2500/2600 | SF-1500 |
| Interface: | 6Gb/s SATA III | 3Gb/s SATA II |
| Sequential read/write speeds: | Upp till 500/500 MB/s | Upp till 260/260 MB/s |
| Random read/write speeds: | Upp till 60K/60K IOPS | Upp till 30K/30K IOPS |
| Flash memory support: | SLC/MLC/eMLC 30nm, 20nm | SLC/MLC/eMLC 50nm, 40nm, 30nm |
| Flash interface: | Asynkront, Toggle, ONFi2 (upp till 166MT) | Asynkront, ONFi1 (upp till 50MT) |
| ECC: | Upp till 55 bits/512B | Up to 24 bits/512B |
| Non-512B Sector: | Ja (520, 524, 528, 4K+DIF) | Nej |
| Security: | AES-256/128 TCG Enterprise Double encryption | AES-128 |
| Storage capacity: | Up to 512GB* | |
| Circuit information: | 400-Pin TFBGA (14×14@0.65mm pitch) | 361-Pin TFBGA (13×13@0.65mm pitch) |
| Other: | Enterprise SMART Attributes Power Failure Supercap Power/Performance Throttling | Enterprise SMART Attributes Power Failure Supercap |
The SSD processors not only supports SATA and SAS but also PCI Express and can be connected to several different NAND flash memory chips. Not the least the new 30/20nm circuits and ONFi2 interface for best possible performance.
Like all SandForce DuraClass processors the SF-2000 family comes without a DRAM cache but the rated performance is still very tempting. We have no information on when the first products with SandForce’ new SSD controller will appear, but stay sure we will be keeping an eye out for them.
