SandForce claims new drive will speed up SSD adoption

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SandForce has announced its first product release, the SF-1000 SSD Processor Family, which the company claimed will accelerate mass-market Solid State Drive (SSD) adoption.

The technology used by SandForce, known as DuraClass, incorporates a number of flash management features with the goal to “differentiate SandForce SSD Processors from standard flash controllers.”

The first of these features is DuraWrite. It is said to optimise the number of program cycles to the flash, extending flash rated endurance by 80 times or more in comparison to standard controllers.

Powerful flash media error correction (ECC) and Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements (RAISE) are further features designed to improve the reliability of the drive. SandForce describe the result as a “single-drive RAID-like protection and recovery from a potentially catastrophic single flash block or die failure [whilst] avoiding the inefficiencies of traditional RAID.”

The Wear Levelling and Monitoring feature allows users to monitor flash block operation and Advanced Read/Program Disturb Management is designed to protect against errant re-programming of cells during read and program cycles and unexpected power loss.

Jeff Janukowicz, research manager of Hard Disk Drive Components and Solid State Disk Drives at IDC, said: “Products like the SF-1000 Family can be major catalysts for increasing SSD adoption in the enterprise.”

“These products should have a highly positive impact on efficiency and total-cost-of-ownership when used in IT applications… which can immediately benefit from the dramatic increase in performance and performance-per-watt that SSDs provide over HDDs.”

The product features a standard 3 gigabit-per-second SATA host interface connecting up to 512 gigabytes of commodity NAND flash memory. It claims to deliver 30K IOPS and 250MB/s performance with 100 micro-second latency.

SandForce has said that the SF-1000 based SSDs would be able to sustain peak performance for a lifecycle of five years.

The SSD Processors for enterprise and mobile computing will be available in prototype quantities in the second quarter of 2009 and SF-1000 Evaluation SSDs and reference designs in standard 2.5” drive form factors will also be available using multiple manufacturers’ NAND flash memory.

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