OCZ Adopts New SandForce Controllers, Readies New Deneva SSDs

As end-users may have learned, SandForce just revealed its new series of high-speed SSD controllers, and it seems that makers of such storage units are quite eager to make use of them, OCZ having already announced that it will soon bring forth a new collection of Deneva models.

The new SandForce SSD controller, the SF-2000 series, are superior to their predecessors in multiple ways.

The most important of them are the support for the SATA 6.0 Gbps interface and the much higher maximum transfer speed, or 500 GB/s both when reading and writing.

So far, SandForce only finished making controllers for enterprise SSDs, with consumer-oriented options set to debut later on.

OCZ decided to move quickly and has already announced the impending arrival of new SandForce SF2000-based Deneva units.

These models will have SATA 6.0 Gbps connectivity or SAS, PCIe or HSDL (High-Speed Data Link).

Depending on which interface each model comes with, they will have speeds of 500 MB/s or more and 60,000 random 4KB write IOPS.

"We have a strong partnership with SandForce and are excited to utilize their new SF-2000 family of SSD processors in our next generation Enterprise and Industrial Solid State Drive products," said Alex Mei, CMO at the OCZ Technology Group.

"Together we will be able to offer our enterprise clients a very robust line of ultra reliable 6Gb/s SSDs in a variety of interfaces ranging from SATA to SAS within our customizable Deneva Series," he added.

The exact controllers slated to be implemented are the SF-2500 and SF- 2600, and the Deneva SSDs will start sampling by year's end and will enter mass production in Q1 2011.

The series will include devices based on either of the supported NAND Flash memory chips, such as SLC (single-level cell), MLC (multi-level cell) and eMLC (enterprise multi-level cell).