SandForce SSD controller brings newfound speed

SandForce SSD controller brings newfound speed

SandForce, based in Milpitas, CA, began production shipments of its second-generation controllers in early 2010, resulting in an immediate uptick in consumer/client SSD drive performance, and ultimately, recognition as a 2011 Product of the Year Award winner. The SF-2200 version has the SATA 6-Gbit/s interface and is specced at a super-fast sequential read/write of up to 500/500 Mbytes/s. Many testers found drives using this controller to be even faster than that.

Founded in December 2006 by Alex Naqvi and Rado Danilak, the company stayed in stealth mode until April 2009 when the first-generation products were introduced. By August 2008 SandForce had grown to about 35 employees.

The Milpitas, CA-based SandForce team that developed the high-performance SF-2200 IC.

First-generation SF-1000 SSD processors were announced in 2009 with production in 2010. The second generation started production shipments in early 2011. By that time the company had moved to new digs in Saratoga, CA.

The SandForce drive controller approaches things differently than others, by removing the need for a DRAM cache (although there is a buffer inside the controller itself). The controller’s DuraWrite technology works like lossless, on-the-fly data compression to significantly reduce the amount of data actually written by the drive. The chip includes Trusted Computing Group (TCG) OPAL security support with 256-bit AES encryption and automatic, line-rate, double encryption with a drive-level password. They also have an advanced ECC engine correcting up to 55 bits per 512-byte sector.

According to the company, the initial company focus was to bring inexpensive MLC flash memory to the enterprise. Because the design is a combination of hardware and firmware, they were able to use a single ASIC across a wide range of products – from mission-critical enterprise to a standard ultrabook user.

To that end, members of the SandForce management team explain to engineers joining the design team that “getting the high performance we can deliver with DuraClass and DuraWrite technology is the result of strong engineering teamwork between SandForce and our customers who leverage our intellectual property to tackle some very significant challenges in a very unique way on very aggressive time schedules.” The company has 40 announced SSD drive companies using their chips, but there are many more than that.

After testing a SF-2200 equipped drive, one publication noted, “Seeing 550 MB/s read and 520 MB/s write speed on a single drive for the first time is a magical experience.”

Last month, LSI Inc., also based in Milpitas, CA, announced the completion of its acquisition of SandForce.

Jim Harrison