SandForce SF-2000 Enable SSDs with 500 MB/s Speeds

SandForce already has the arguably most popular generation of SD controllers but is quite eager to even further expand its dominance by bringing out a whole new series of SSDs, the so-called SF-2000 line which is much more powerful than the SF-1200 and SF-1500.

As some end-users may know, most solid state drives released so far communicate via the SATA 3.0 Gbps interface and have read/write speeds of up to over 280 MB/s and 270 MB/s, respectively.

Now, not too long after it got $25 million in funding, SandForce has released a new generation of controllers that push the maximum transfer rate all the way up to 500 MB/s for both reading and writing.

This high rate relies on another asset, namely the native support for the SATA 6.0 Gbps interface, whose bandwidth significantly exceeds (obviously) that of SATA 3.0 Gbps.

These two are hardly the only advantages of the new controllers, however. In fact, the newcomers will enable improvements of all kinds.

For instance, the maximum supported capacity is of 512 GB, whereas the supported types of NAND Flash chips include MLC (multi-level cell), eMLC (enterprise multi-level cell) and SLC (single-level cell).

Said chips can be built using any 3xnm or 2xnm manufacturing process.

What's more, the SF-2000 controllers have a random read/write performance of 60,000/60,000 IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second).

SandForce also made sure to implement enhanced dual-ported SAS bridge support, including sector sizes different from 512 bytes.

Other aspects are the advanced ECC engine, which corrects up to 55 bits per 512-byte sector, and the TCG Enterprise security with selectable multi-banded 256-bit or 128-bit AES encryption.

Finally, the controllers support Asynch, Toggle and ONFi2 Flash interfaces, plus power and performance throttling options.

For now, the SF-2000 series features only enterprise-aimed chips (SF-2300, SF-2500 and SF-2600) and there is no word on when a consumer-oriented model will show up.