SandForce Announces Next-Gen SSDs, SF-2000 Capable of 500MB/s and 60K IOPS
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 7, 2010 9:30 AM ESTFinal Words
SandForce conveyed to me that although we may see hardware this year, production firmware and silicon won’t be ready until early Q1. Anything that ships before then is not what SandForce considers production worthy. This is an important distinction as SandForce’s partners often ship with pre-release hardware/firmware in order to gain traction and sales as quickly as possible. We’ll probably see less of this as SandForce matures as a company.
The specs behind the SF-2000 are downright amazing. If SandForce can deliver this sort of performance within two quarters I will be floored. If we’re talking about 500MB/s for a single drive next year, the sort of performance you’ll be able to get through a multi-drive array will be staggering. We’re easily heading towards gigabytes per second of affordable I/O bandwidth, not to mention that SandForce will have nearly maxed out 6Gbps SATA on its first attempt.
We will of course see drives from the usual suspects. OCZ, Corsair and even Seagate is now officially listed as a SandForce customer. Looks like those Pulsar rumors were true.
There’s still a long way to go before we’re at the point where we have a shipping SF-2xxx based drive with these specs however. If you remember the growing pains that Intel, Indilinx, Micron and SandForce all experienced with this current generation of controllers, I don’t expect the next round to be any easier.
SandForce is serious however. The company only has 88 employees but it just closed another round of funding ($25M Series D), bringing the total funding to $67M. The company is headed for an IPO. And if it can pull off the SF-2000 we saw on paper today, SandForce may have the sales to support it.
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IceDread - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
Hehe oh yes.Looks like they beat intel's new controller as well, impressive!
Chloiber - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
I want to see some benches first before I believe ANYTHING.Same with SF1200. 275MB/s seq. writes on paper but in reality you are down to 100-140MB/s.
Same for the IOPS.
So yeah - unless I see some real benches...
bunnyfubbles - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Agreed, however even if we get real world speed improvements proportional to the best case "on-paper" specs then we're looking at well over 400/MB read and 200MB/sec write real world speeds, which would be amazing for a single drive without resorting to a RAID controller.Intel really seems to be falling by the wayside when we compare these projected specs to what Intel is claiming with their G3 drives, which don't look too threatening to current Sandforce drives let alone this future beast. Hopefully this means some competitive pricing that finally starts to truly drive down SSD prices.
Chloiber - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
These specs are controller specs, not SSD specs - remember that.These specs are, what the controller can handle - Flash NOT included. So I would really be impressed if we see those specs on a MLC-based SSD for us consumers.
mino - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Playing the "steady as she goes" song seems a very sensible path for Intel considering the Rock'n'Roll stuff others play.While Intel really wants to be major player LONG-TERM, they need not hurry.
Alas they had their share of mess with buggy FW upgrades not so long ago. I do not see them being overly aggressive anytime soon.
Jaybus - Saturday, October 16, 2010 - link
It isn't all about the controller. Intel will have, at least for a while, a huge lead in price/performance because they are going to 25 nm flash. They will get nearly double the capacity of current 34 nm flash for the same price. Others will also move to 25 nm flash, eventually, but meanwhile, Intel will have an advantage. Also, Intel's controllers have proven to be really good in the real world, and the new one is expected to be on par with SF-1200.I'm sure SF-2000 will be the better performer, but if I a 300 GB Intel drive is the same price as a 160 GB SF-2000 drive, then the SF-2000 drive better be twice as fast. It remains to be seen, but if the SF-2000 isn't WAY, WAY faster, then I'll take twice the capacity for the same price any day.
mailman65er - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
So yeah - unless I see some real benches...Totally agreed. And the more "application-specific" the benchmark is, the better. There is so much data 'manipulation' going on inside these modern SSD controllers that you almost need to run "your own" workloads to gauge actual performance.
Guspaz - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Intel's revealed specs on the G3's performance were so underwhelming that it wouldn't take much to destroy them when it comes to performance. SandForce's previous generation parts are already faster than the G3 on paper in terms of sequential transfer rates. Even if they don't surpass that in practice, they're not that far off, so it wouldn't take much of a performance increase from SandForce's next-gen parts to surpass that.rundll - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Intel's 3G's SSDs overall performance should be way over SandForce's actual generations SSDs simply thanks to superior IOPS (read/write 50000/40000).Now, if Intel's 25nm production technology produces significantly cheaper SSDs, could Intel's SSD remain somewhat competitive choice in every day desktop use with its pretty decent speed. Especially if SandForce is putting a hefty pricetag to its new controller.
We'll see.
jonup - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Keep in mind that Intel sells a complete drives not just the controller. They can affort to make their profits not only from the controller but from the entire product. Other SSD manufacturer pay the profit margin of the controller manufacturer as well as the falsh manufacturer and therefore at the end of the day the cost of their final product is highe than Intel's. Intel can affort to sale their products at a significantly lower price than its compatitor and still maintain higher profitability than Sandforce (controller manufacturer) and OCZ, Corsair (drive manufacturers).I believe that Intel position its G3 to capture larger market instead of trying to acheave king of the hill performance. If the supply for SSD begins to match the demand prices of SSDs might start shooting down (as we have been promised for a while now) and Intel will be the big winner. As I've said before, Intel's performance is enough for the needs of the mainsteam PC user that is currently using fast HDDs due to the high cost of SSDs.