SandForce to Soon Launch SF-2000 Family of SSD Controllers

When SSDs first hit the scene in a big way, there were only a couple of controller vendors floating about – at least, those that we heard of. Of course there was Intel, but also JMicron, Indilinx and Samsung. Then out of nowhere, came a company named SandForce, and since then, it has become a demanding player in the controller game, arguably producing the best offerings today.

Where the company really shined was with its SF-1200 and SF-1500 controllers, which vendors wasted no time in getting into their SSD offerings. Even before the controller’s official launch, companies such as OCZ had products ready to go, and it’s easy to understand why… the performance was incredible. Well, as Anand explores, the company is soon to impress once again (hopefully), with its SF-2000 family of enterprise controllers.

Architecturally, the SF-2000 family isn’t starkly different to the SF-1500, but it does bring things like SATA 3.0 (6Gbit/s) support and far improved security (AES 256-bit). Most notably, though, is the possibility of 60,000 IOPS performance… about double the current implementation. For raw data transfers, we could expect things to top out at around 500MB/s, sequential read and write. With two of these drives, you could literally transfer a 10GB file in a mere 20 seconds!

The way that SandForce improved things is that it treats the NAND in more of a RAM-like manner, allowing synchronous data transfer with what’s called the ONFI 2 Sync NAND Interface. The WE (write enable) command becomes “CLK”, similar to RAM, RE (real enable) becomes “W/R#”. A new signal, “DQS”, is bi-directional, enabling impressive performance.

To help greatly with the longevity of the drive, data is essentially compressed to take up less physical blocks, but contrary to popular belief, this somehow doesn’t affect performance in any real way. When it comes to compression, a hardware solution simply can’t be beat. I guess you could compared it to how instruction sets on CPUs are utilized. If something is highly optimized, the performance can be outstanding.

Despite the lack of actual product, Anand did well to delve deep into the SF-2000 architecture and explain all of what’s new, so check it out if you want to dig even deeper into the details.

Both ONFI 2 and Toggle NAND add another bit to the NAND interface: the DQS signal. The Write Enable signal is still present but it’s now only used for latching commands and addresses, DQS is used for data transfers. Instead of only transferring data when the DQS signal is high, ONFI2 and Toggle NAND support transferring data on both the rising and falling edges of the DQS signal. This should sound a lot like DDR to you, because it is.