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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Zan Lynx - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
People will be able to get what they want and/or need based on what they can afford.The guys who pay for custom painted cases with three GPUs and water cooling will probably want to throw in a 4GB/s storage "drive".
The ordinary people will be happy enough if their games and word processor open in less than 10 seconds so they will be paying for the cheap drives.
The enterprise folks will throw a half-million dollars at a SAN vendor and say "Make it work really really fast." Heh.
iwodo - Sunday, October 10, 2010 - link
1. reads 330MB/s and writes 33MB/s ?? I think you need reference to backup your "facts" DDR /Toggle Mode NAND only reads @ 166Mbps ( Mega Bits, Not Bytes as you reference )But yes, NAND SSD speed is easily scalable. ( As i mentioned in previous comment which i asked the same question )
We will be limited by controller, someday due to all the error correction, overhead etc. But that is still very far off.
In the thread i posted in forum about Diminishing returns of SSD Speed. Basically concludes we have already / near reach that tipping point. Because under very limited situation you will ever need 4GB/s Read write speed. It is the Random Read Write that will count.
However software still assume we are on HDD, therefore we will be limited to OS, drivers and other side of software to see any other performance difference.
Keatah - Friday, October 15, 2010 - link
Uhm yeh, that's what they said about 640k! Nobody is gonna need more than 640k!I would stick to mechanical drives to meet those requirements. SSD's are anything but bug-free and stable and cheap. Not yet.
JonnyDough - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
"Performance: Welcome to the 500 Club"As long as its nothing like The 700 Club. Those crackers are so off base its scary. :P
Arbie - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
This reminds me very much of the Hewlett-Packard cartridge tape drives of the mid-nineties. They were sold as "250MB" although they really only held 125MB. The fake rating was created by assuming all your data could be compressed by 50% !! Impressive work by HP - advancing the standard of US technical innovation.
Anyway, I really hope Anandtech will test these SSDs with compressed files as well.
PeanutGallery - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
Will I be able to use the encryption if it's installed in a MacBook Pro? (latest 13 inch)If so, how?
Havor - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
Even do if these drives come out and will be near enough to the price of a Vertex 2 i will certainly get one, but what i am waiting for even more is a controller whit native PCIe 4x ore 8x support.PCIe 2.x got a bi-directional throughput off 500MB/s per lane, that hold in that PCIe 2.x throughput of 250MB data in and/ore 250MB data out, minus +/- 20% overhead.
PCIe 4x ((4 x 250MB = 1GB) - 20% = 800MB/s) ore PCIe 8x ((8 x 250MB = 2GB) - 20% = 1.6GB/s)
Also saves a lot of steps of the ones currently in use (RevoDrive: SATA > raid controller > PCI-X > PCIe) ore the more expensive ones (other one's: SATA > raid controller > PCIe)
Think they will come it just will take time.
aviv - Saturday, October 9, 2010 - link
hey anand all winsxs dir in vista or windows 7 are dupes files that make the test not rightsoonlar - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
"At full speed you could copy 1GB of data from a SF-2000 drive to another SF-2000 drive in 2 seconds. If SandForce can actually deliver this sort of performance I will be blown away."1GB?
Keatah - Friday, October 15, 2010 - link
Anyone that buys an SSD today is an early adopter. These drives are not consumer grade and definitely not prime-time ready.Another 2 years. Then we're good to go. Simple as that!