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 ESTPerformance: Welcome to the 500 Club
Let’s talk peak performance specs. I must preface this with a warning, all of the numbers you’re about to see are SandForce’s estimates and projections for how the SF-2000 series will perform. Next week you’ll see some basic functionality and performance testing but as far as I know, these numbers haven’t been reached yet. SandForce is confident that it will hit them once drives start shipping, but until then take what you are about to see with a grain of salt.
Random read and write performance goes up significantly over the SF-1200/1500. We are at 40K IOPS today, and SandForce is promising 60K IOPS with the SF-2000. Note that this is not only higher than anything shipping today, it’s even higher than what we recently found out about Intel’s 3rd generation X25-M/X25-E SSDs.
Now the shocker. Thanks to 6Gbps and ONFI 2/Toggle support, the SF-2000 will support up to 500MB/s sequential read and write speeds. On an 8 channel device that’s actually only 62.5MB/s per channel but the combined bandwidth is just ridiculous for a single drive. 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.
Let’s talk about reality for a second. SandForce quotes standard iometer numbers, which are usually quite optimistic for SandForce's controllers. I’d expect real world performance to be a bit below these figures but not by a lot for many workloads.
In the SF-1200/1500 series, SandForce used enterprise features to differentiate the two controllers. You got some improved reliability and a giant capacitor with the SF-1500 designs, but you didn’t really get any added performance. With the SF-2000 series, we will see more differentiation between the enterprise and consumer parts. SandForce indicated that the consumer version of the SF-2000 would have a different level of performance. I get the impression that the specifics of the consumer drive haven’t been determined yet. I’ve already started campaigning to see a full spec version in the consumer market but it’s still far too early to tell what will be shipped. If the 3rd generation X25-M is really only capable of 270MB/s reads and 170MB/s writes, I’m not sure if there will be the motivation to deliver a 500/500MBps part into the enthusiast market.
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tipoo - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
...Isn't going to stay relevant long, is it? Already up to 500MB/s SSD's, and SATA 3 isn't even mainstream yet. Its going to become a bottleneck soon, just like SATA II is for current SSD's.rundll - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Well, OCZ introduced few days back a new data link interface HSDL to handle Sata bottlenecks. Let's see what this means in real life.aguilpa1 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Break out your piggy banks if this is the wavejonup - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
They are a private company. As Anand said, a success of the new controller might force them in an IPOiwodo - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Can we plug 2 SATA 6Gbps into a Single 2.5" SSD? We manage to max out SATA 3.0 in one go, and it is SATA 3.0 not even widely available yet.I hope the there would be at least some minor improvement in their DuraWrite and other part of the controller. Otherwise it looks like an overclocked Sandforce with better NAND interface to me.
Firmware should be less of an issues, since it is similar to older chips, the firmware should be stable enough.
Cant wait......
rundll - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
"...Otherwise it looks like an overclocked Sandforce with better NAND interface to me"Did we read the same article?
nexox - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Ehh, you know 12Gbit SATA/SAS is due out in 2012, right? That's about in time for Sandforce's 3rd gen controller.And just because they've managed to double their bandwidth with this generation doesn't mean they've still got another trick up their sleeves to double their bandwidth again for the rev after this one.
Iketh - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
we're not talking physical limitations of a head moving back and forth on a spinning disk.... doubling performance at the least is much more the norm in the realm of silicon, nothing remotely close to a "trick" about itsoftdrinkviking - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
I hope we get light peak before that; I just like the idea of my data flashing around through my pc in bursts of light. It's all so very "future is now."iwodo - Saturday, October 9, 2010 - link
No Trick, DDR NAND @ 133Mbps x 8 Channel already gives you just over 1Gbps SSD.And that is with CURRENT tech, the best thing about SSD is that it is easily scalable. You could do 10 Channel like Intel, ( Expensive ), or 16 Channel for total bandwidth since you get 16 Chips on a SSD.
You could also speed up NAND with DDR tech or small node but higher clockspeed.
The only limitation is how fast the controller could work. Which we still have much headroom.