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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ibudic1 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Intel will be slower, but I bet it will be more reliable.Intel will also be able to offer twice the storage for the same amount 22nm vs 32 nm.
So high stable performance and twice the area, vs fast and small. So far all of this is vaporware.
Nihility - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
I wouldn't call the Intel product vaporware. It's almost guaranteed that they'll ship them on time.ggathagan - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
I believe ibudic1 was referring to the Sandforce controller as vaporware, not Intel's product.sbrown23 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
You mean 25nm vs 34nm? And Intel products are generally not vaporware. They have a fairly good record of delivery. This isn't Duke Nukem Forever, here.anindividual - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
http://www.plianttechnology.com/They have had an enterprise drive line with a proprietary controller on the market for over a year with much of this capability.
bji - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
That link indicates that the company in question is using SLC flash in their drives. This is guaranteed to put them out of the same price range as the Intel and Sandforce MLC drives, the latter already being expensive enough to be seriously limited in their market uptake. Conclusion: almost nobody is buying the Pliant Technology drives because they are too expensive compared to other options.mino - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Nobody is willing to go for MLC in REAL enterprise drives.X25-E and the Sandforce stuff is mostly good for HPC and lower mid-range, but mostly DAS setups.
The EMC's of this world use far more robust (and far more pricey) solutions.
nexox - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
"""X25-E and the Sandforce stuff is mostly good for HPC and lower mid-range, but mostly DAS setups."""X25-E is an SLC drive. The X25-M is MLC.
"""Nobody is willing to go for MLC in REAL enterprise drives."""
You'll find that vendors are not targeting MLC at enterprises, but rather eMLC, which is somewhat different.
And you'd be wrong about enterprises wanting to avoid eMLC drives. They (will) serve pretty well for many work loads, in places where SLC is cost prohibitive, and spinning disks are too slow.
Casper42 - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
"Nobody is willing to go for MLC in REAL enterprise drives" ????I work for HP in the Server division and all I can legally tell you is your WRONG.
PS: Ever heard of a slow little drive called the ioDrive Duo? The 640GB model uses MLC. I recently sold 3 of these to a Global 100 company that plans to run a SQL based Data Mining app on them.
HachavBanav - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
Pliant "LB 150S" = 150GB (2.5" + SLC + SAS dual port ) for $4500 !@anindividual : please ask your boss to review the price, this is just non-sense !