SandForce SSD controllers offer better security, speed

From InfoWorld: Solid-state processor maker SandForce today announced a new line of controllers for enterprise-class drives that promise to double I/Os per second (IOPS) for those products.

SandForce's new SF-2000 family of solid-state drive (SSD) processors use 6Gbps SATA II connectivity, which offers up to 500MBps sequential read and write performance. The company said it also doubled the number of IOPS from 30,000 to 60,000 over its previous SF-1500 family of controllers.

The company said it's shipping samples of the new controller family to storage manufacturers this quarter and expects to ramp up production of the new processors in the first and second quarter of 2011. The new controller is aimed at SSDs for workstations and high-end gaming machines.

As the amount of stored data grows -- and the size of flash memory continues to shrink -- data bit error rates are increasing, requiring more sophisticated error correction code (ECC). For example, Micron and Intel recently released flash memory using circuitry only 25 nanometers (nm) in width with three bits per cell. That compares to two-bits-per-cell 30nm and 40nm technology that Micron and its competitors have been using.

SandForce has moved from ECC to a BCH (Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem) algorithm because it is more efficient at correcting both highly concentrated and widely scattered bit errors on flash memory.

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