14 DAY TRIAL // For a long time, the SandForce series of controller chips was the best range of processors usable in solid state drives, even though they did make the SSDs more expensive than others. Now, Phison has revealed a controller with comparable specs.
Some other controller chips have shown a good ability to give solid state drives a lot of speed and capacity. However, they never matched SF ones from LSI.
On the flip side, most SandForce-enabled SSDs don't really attain the top 550 MHz transfer throughput in real life most of the time.
It is unclear if the new Phison Electronics chip will, but its technical spec sheet does show that it is, at least, theoretically possible.
The new chip is called PS3110 and is basically a quad-core CPU with end-to-end data path protection circuits and SmartECC technology.
It can support both MLC (multi-level cell) and TLC (triple-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips, while ensuring that no errors sneak in during reads or writes. This is actually the first Phison chip with TLC support.
The top read speed is said to be of 550 MB/s, while writing is achieved at 530 MB/s on a good day. These are the sustained, sequential speeds. The Random 4K performance is of 100,000 IOPS read (input/output operations per second) and 90,000 write.
Of course, the maximum speeds will not be achieved by just any SSDs. If the capacity isn't of at least 256 GB or 480 GB, the writing, at least, will go slower.
Fortunately, though, that issue probably won't crop up much. After all, the new PS3110 controller is made for high-capacity SSDs of up to 2 TB. That's right, you'll finally see SSDs with real HDD-level capacity in SATA and (possibly) M.2 and mSATA form factors as well.
AES-256 hardware encryption is another asset. It will keep data protected from unauthorized access. Well, some hackers will probably be able to circumvent it, but that can be said about any electronic device with memory of any sort.
SSDs powered by the Phison PS3110 chip will be available by the end of this quarter (Q3 2014), complete with S.M.A.R.T support (through Phison SSD ToolBox) and SmartECC RAID data protection, among other things. Prices will vary, but they will be on the high spectrum, especially for the 2 TB units. A list of brand vendors that have or will sign supply contracts with Phison has not been disclosed yet.