From DailyTech: NAND flash controller chip designer Indilinx has made quite a name for itself in the Solid State Drive market. Their Barefoot controller is used in the majority of SSDs sold to enthusiasts, and is generally credited for enabling affordable SSDs with decent random read/write speeds (and no stuttering). This provided pricing competition for Intel, which introduced their second generation SSDs using 34nm NAND flash earlier this year at very attractive prices. The Barefoot controller was designed in Korea and is built on a 90nm process. It features TRIM support and 64MB of DRAM cache. The controller can be used for SSDs as large as 512GB. The fastest SATA SSD using the controller is OCZ's Vertex Turbo, with a maximum read speed of 270 MB/s. The SATA II interface that the Barefoot controller uses is only capable of 300MB/s. With protocol overhead factored in, the real world performance of SSDs is already limited when reading from cache, leading many SSD manufacturers to create PCIe-based solutions. New types of flash like the DDR MLC NAND recently announced by Samsung will allow much faster read and write speeds with the next genera View: Article @ Source Site |