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 ESTSecurity: AES-256 and Double Encryption
The SF-1200/1500 controllers have a real time AES-128 encryption engine. Set a BIOS password and the drive should be locked unless you supply that password once again (note I haven’t actually tried this). The SF-2000 implements an AES-256 engine and supports double encryption. The former enables stronger encryption, while the latter allows you to set a different encryption key for multiple address ranges on the drive.
Enhanced ECC
As NAND densities go up, so will error rates and in response SandForce boosted the error correction engine on its controller. The SF-2000 error checks and corrects at a 512-byte granularity with a 55-bit BCH, up from 24-bits per 512-bytes.
The Family
SandForce is announcing three parts today: the SF-2300, SF-2500 and SF-2600. All three controllers have the same performance specs but differ in features.
The SF-2500 is the base enterprise drive. For industrial use there’s the SF-2300 that can operate at more ridiculous temperatures. The SF-2600 ships with the external SAS bridge and a special firmware revision to enable support for non-512B sectors.
Many enterprise storage systems use larger-than-512B sectors to store error correction information among other things. These sizes can be awkward like 520 bytes, 524 bytes, 528 bytes or even a 4K sector with an additional data integrity field. Currently the SF-1200/1500 controllers support these non-standard sector sizes, but you run into performance issues since writes aren’t aligned to how the drive is organized internally. With the SF-2600, there’s firmware support for any one of these sector types. The drive handles alignment issues in hardware, presumably without any performance overhead. SandForce indicated that you’d need to configure the drive for sector size in the firmware, meaning the adjustment isn’t dynamic.
Since this is a very particular type of enterprise SSD feature that’s usually seen in SAS devices, the SF-2600 is paired with a native SAS to SATA bridge. The controller is still SATA internally but the SF-2600 reference design will feature a SAS bridge on-board.
All of the enterprise SF-2000 controllers support TRIM. They also support performance throttling based on remaining program/erase cycles on the drive’s NAND (slow down the drive so the NAND lasts longer, as well as power based performance throttling (slow down the drive to reduce power consumption). SandForce hasn’t announced power specs for the SF-2000 drives, but given Intel’s drive power went up with the 3rd generation X25s I would expect something similar here.
The consumer member of the SF-2000 family will be announced sometime early next year. We will hopefully see a fairly high end version of the consumer part, missing only the enterprise specific features but retaining all of the performance.
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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!