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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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!