SandForce Brings MLC SSD Controller to Server Flash Drives

Despite the rapid and impressive growth of Solid State Drive technology, the market for SSDs is still marked by the higher price tag of these Flash-based solutions, compared with the traditional hard disk drives. The situation is equally present in both the server and the consumer market, two segments that are mainly differentiated by the level of performance that SSDs can deliver. For the sever market, SSDs have been built using single-level cell flash chips, a solution that offers an increased performance over the MLC-based SSDs available in the consumer market. However, that situation could change, thanks to a solution provided by SandForce.

The Saratoga, California-based SandForce is aiming to become the first company to develop a controller that can support multi-level cell (MLC) flash chips designed for server SSDs. The SF-1500 controller is said to be capable of handling sequential read and write speeds of 250Mb/s on a maximum of 128 Kbyte blocks. The controller is also said to be capable of performing read and write speeds at 30,000 IOPS.

Additional features include an MTBF of 10 million hours, AES-128 encryption, an average power consumption of 625 milliwatts and a maximum of 1.5W. It can support up to 16 flash chips with a density of 32Mbits, for a maximum storage capacity of 512GB in drives of 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch form factors.

According to the company, the chips will use a 3Gb/s SATA interface and will enter production this fall, while versions with 6Gb/s SATA and SAS interfaces are currently under development. The solution has been achieved through the implementation of new algorithms that increase the flash chip endurance by optimizing the number of write operations per second.

The solution developed by SandForce could enable a faster adoption of SSDs in the server market, which, according to IDC, has seen just 44,000 server-class flash drives shipped last year. However, SandForce estimates that as many as ten million server-class flash drives could ship by 2012.

The company was founded by Alex Naqvi, the former CEO and CTO of startup Luminous Networks and Radoslav Danilak, a former graphics processor designer for the Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA.