‘Ssds with SF3000 controller delayed until first half of 2015’

The first SSDs with a Seagate SF3000 controller will not appear at the end of this year as announced last summer, but only in the first half of next year, claims VR-Zone. The controller generation was announced almost a year ago.

VR-Zone does not provide many details about the delay, only that sources within the components industry have been informed that there are problems with ‘Pci-e end products’ using the SF3000 controllers, with it being unknown whether these are firmware updates. or hardware problems. The controller generation was announced in November 2013, but the question was when the first products would appear on the market. Earlier reports spoke of a release in the third quarter, but in the summer it became clear that that period would not be met, after which the fourth quarter of 2014 was mentioned. So now it will be possible early 2015.

The SF3000 series promises to be a significant step forward for the SSD market as it includes the first controllers optimized to use the bandwidth offered by PCI-e 2.0 x4. Current controllers are mainly built to use the SATA 600 interface, but more and more SSDs are using PCI-e with its bi-directional I/O data traffic. Using pci-e x4, sequential read and write speeds of 1800MB/s would thus be possible, while the number of iops for random reads and writes would be 150K and 81k respectively.

In May this year, it was announced that Seagate is acquiring LSI, and with it SandForce, from Avago. LSI acquired SandForce in 2011. As a result of the acquisition, the controllers will be marketed under the Seagate name.