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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
84 Comments
View All Comments
Rasterman - Sunday, October 17, 2010 - link
Anyone have any guesses on sizes and prices?ABR - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
I don't give much of a hoot about 6GB/s controllers and sequential performance. I'd be happier to see a 1.5GB/s interface actually utilized. Real desktop and a lot of server use consists of overlapping highly random reads, and moderately random writes. Loading an application with tons of resource files, saving documents and state to 3 or 4 directories at once, things like that. This is the whole big win of SSDs: eliminating the seek time. So I don't care about some 500MB/s number if you happen to be copying a giant file from one freshly written drive to a new blank drive. I do care about random access to a heavily used disk, and this is still sitting back in the realm of 10's of MB/s.In fact this whole hoopla about ever-increasing pure sequential transfers reminds me of the megahertz wars -- everyone shouted 10 years ago about this several hundred MHz or that GHz, meanwhile memory (and hence most actual computing) poked along at tens of MHz. Most of the progress in CPUs since that time has been in using all kinds of fancy branch prediction and pipelining structures exactly for the purpose of dealing with memory latency.
Powersupply - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
Good post!kevith - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
It certainly looks as if we are approaching some amazing speeds in the months to come, lovely.But what is it with RAID, that makes it pop up every now and then in storage-reviews?
"... the sort of performance you’ll be able to get through a multi-drive array will be staggering..."
As far as I can read in every single test of RAID-0 vs single drives I´ve ever read - here at Anandtech inclusive - it appears, that there is no real difference in speed with a RAID-0 setup.
In synthetic benchmarks, there is a measurable effect, but in everyday use there is none.
A lot of folks in various forums claim they have doubled their transfer-speed, some even tripled, but everytime a serious Magazine like Your own, Tom´s, BitTech or others try to find out just how great it is, it always end up the same way: No bang for the buck at all.
Are there maybe new aspects when we´re talking SSD´s, that I am not aware of?