SandForce, a company that produces advanced controllers for nand memory, among other things, has developed a series of processors that should increase the performance and lifespan of solid state disks.
According to SandForce, the new processors should find their way to SSDs this year. The processors from the SF-1000 SSD line could be used in solid state disks with both SLC and MLC memory. The most important innovation in the single-chip controllers for SSDs lies in the DuraClass technology, which, according to the American chip manufacturer, should make it possible for nand memory to retain data longer and for the drives to also last longer. The controllers could address up to 512GB of memory and enable read and write speeds over the sata300 bus of 250MB/s. The controllers would enable 30,000 iops and are especially suitable for use in server and laptop SSDs. It is not clear whether there are plans to also use the controller in consumer SSDs to replace the plagued JMicron controller.
The DuraClasstechnique achieves the longer life of the memory cells by limiting the number of write cycles by optimizing the writes. According to SandForce, this efficiency increase would extend the life of flash memory by a factor of eighty. The controller also arranges the available memory chips in a low-level raid setup and combines the resulting redundancy with an error correction protocol. The company’s SF-1000 controller also ensures an optimal distribution of the data among the memory cells so that they are subject to as little wear as possible and the wiping of partially used cells is optimized. Samples of the controllers will become available towards the end of the second quarter, but SandForce has not yet announced prices and availability of the final product.