Understanding SandForce's SF-1200 & SF-1500, Not All Drives are Equal
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 16, 2010 11:30 AM ESTWhere Do We Go From Here?
Corsair is under no obligation to ship drives with the 3.0.5 firmware. Assuming there are no other problems with the 3.0.1 firmware, Corsair could presumably keep shipping the higher performing OCZ-like firmware. The problem is that if you ever need to upgrade your firmware, you could lose performance.
As I've mentioned in the past, customers of whatever company or companies work closest with the controller manufacturer will undoubtedly get access to firmware quicker than anyone else. We've seen this work both in favor of and against the best interests of the consumer. Sometimes you get features/performance early (e.g. TRIM support for Indilinx drives) and other times you get early, untested firmware. Your best bet at this point is to hold off on any SF-1200 purchases unless you're willing to accept the risks that comes with.
The case isn’t closed on this issue however, not by a long shot. It’s my understanding that the SandForce/OCZ exclusivity agreement is currently only a short term agreement. While the companies are in the process of negotiating a long term agreement, nothing is final yet.
There are some measures in place to ensure that you can’t flash an OCZ firmware on a non-OCZ drive (and vice versa) but there’s nothing saying that at some point this won’t change either.
We also don’t know what the real world impact of the standard SF-1200 firmware will be. I’m hoping to have a standard SF-1200 drive with production firmware very soon and I will report my findings as soon as possible.
I’ve also communicated to SandForce that this should have never happened. It was well aware that there would be a performance difference between the Vertex 2 and all other SF-1200 drives, and there’s absolutely no reason any company other than OCZ should have had 3.0.1 with that exclusivity agreement in place. It’s simply not right to give your partners performance that you know for a fact will later be taken away. SandForce indicated to me that everyone was aware that performance could change between firmware revisions, but in my opinion this is still not being totally transparent. The moment a review based on Corsair’s Force drive went live, SandForce should’ve had a discussion with Corsair and the reviewer. We weren’t the first to review the Force drive, but it wasn’t until after our review went live that SandForce contacted us.
SandForce is a very young company and this just sounds like a bad case of partner mismanagement. Thankfully there haven’t been that many SF-1200 drives sold, but if you’re considering one you have to keep in mind that you could see performance drop in one metric with a firmware update. Note that the drive will still perform as specified, the SF-1200 controller is only rated for 10,000 sustained 4K random write IOPS.
There’s also the issue of SSD makers shipping drives based on firmware that’s not MP ready. I’ve established a more direct line with SandForce so I’ll at least be made aware of what firmware is ready for shipping and what isn’t. I’ll also be putting more pressure on manufacturers to only ship MP ready firmware. Let this serve as a warning to SSD manufacturers. I haven't been keeping close tabs on shipping firmware revisions since I never recommend any brand new, unproven SSD controller. But clearly I'm going to have to start docking points for not following controller manufacturer guidance. This stuff is serious guys, you're playing with our data here - I can't stress that enough.
As I keep mentioning in my coverage of SandForce and any other new SSDs, if you jump on board you’re assuming a risk. These drives and controllers are largely unproven. While I’m doing my best to put them through their paces, I can’t test every system combination. On top of that, many of these companies are newcomers to the industry and as an early adopter, you might find yourself in the middle of a situation like this.
This is unfolding in real time so I’ll keep you posted as I come across any new developments.
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cactusdog - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
I hope this isnt a case of bait and switch. Did they make a few parts with the quality controller then once the reviews are up switch to the cheaper controller for the masses? We've seen it before.....aconu - Saturday, April 17, 2010 - link
HelloI purchase an 200GB OWC drive the first day of their availability.
Unfortunately, i encountered troubles with the drive (growing I/O errors over one week of use, until heavy data corruption and unbootable OS). After tree secure erases, and tree weeks of repeated symptoms, i decided to return the SSD.
The drive was unavailable until yesterday, and suddenly the specs changes.
That's mean OWC will going to replace my drive with a lower specs one ?
willscary - Saturday, April 17, 2010 - link
I was told that ALL Mercury Extreme SSDs now utilize the Sandforce 1200 controller.eva2000 - Saturday, April 17, 2010 - link
Thanks Anand great info, saved me alot of $$$ as i wait and see, already got a 256GB Crucial C300. Was thinking of getting OWC 100/200GB but last month emailed them to ask about their units and compatibility list and they said they mainly cater to Mac users so OWC SSD has no guarantee for compatibility on PC systems. That already put me off unfortunately.skimike - Tuesday, June 15, 2010 - link
How did you perform your secure erase? The last time I contacted OWC about ANY utilities for the Mercury Extreme drives, their tech support had no clue. They didn't even know what a secure erase was. The guy I talked to told me to "write 0's to the entire drive".et01267 - Sunday, April 18, 2010 - link
Interesting, I also ordered the 200GB Mercury extreme from OWC/Macsales a couple of days ago and there was a delay in availability (and then the specs on the site were changed). However, my invoice states:200GB OWC Mercury ExtremeSSD EntRAID 200GB Mercury Extreme RAID-Ready Enterprise Class SSD 2.5" Serial-ATA 9.5mm Solid State Drive. High Performance internal storage. Fastest read and write times of any SSD available today! 10 million hours MTBF. 5 Year OWC Warranty.
So, did will I get a Sandforce 1500 or 1200 controller? I should find out tomorrow when it arrives.
In the meantime, I'd appreciate you putting me in touch with your contacts at OWC.
Thanks for the informative, if somewhat ill-timed (for me) article.
willscary - Monday, April 19, 2010 - link
This was exactly what happened to me. Check with the website and see what their current specs are. I was in the exact same boat and my SSDs had already shipped. When I called OWC, it took a while, but they did admit that all Mercury Extremes are now utilizing the Sandforce 1200 controller. They got their product reviewed glowingly with one controller and used that controllers specifications, then changed hardware without telling those of us who had already purchased and were waiting for delivery. I was upset about the deception and the failure to offer a discount, as the 1200 costs $100-150 less than the 1500 (per Digitalloyd's update from yesterday). By the way, this digitalloyd seems to have NO problem with this practice!bludragon - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
"In a population of 10,000,000 controllers, with a rating of 10,000,000 hours, the probability is that 1 unit would fail in an hour. The SF-1200 would have 5 units fail in the same time. The failure probability drops as the number of controllers drops (SF won’t be shipping anywhere near 10M of these things)."This make no sense as it implies that somehow sandforce producing more controllers after they shipped mine is going to reduce the lifetime of my controller.
I think what you mean is that MTBF is listed for a single device. If I use 2, then the MTBF of the 2 combined will halve, and so having such high figures is relevant.
Lifted - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
MTBF is meaningless with 1 or 2 drives. It's meant for large Enterprise customers and data centers where they may have thousands of drives. These customers need to know how often to expect drive failures in order to know how many resources need to be dedicated to this (personnel and spare drives).The strange thing is that Anand has been reviewing hard drives and SSD's for so many years now, with direct access to the manufacturers, but he never once asked what MTBF was. Why did he only find it strange now when hard drives have always had 1,000,000+ hour MTBF ratings?
Anyway, nice article. Keep them coming.
pzkfwg - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
I suppose this stat can be converted into a probability which would be relevant to a single drive. Indeed, saying that "1 drive out of 10,000,000 will die within an hour of operation" means exactly the same thing as "you have 0,00001% chance of having your single drive dying within its first hour of operation" which is kind of relevant to a single drive and isn't linked to the number of controllers produced by SandForce.Out of this number, there is probably a way to have a more useful probability such as the chance of having your drive fail within its first two years of operation, but I don't know how to compute it (maybe a so called "normal" distribution or something would be the key).