| finding out
more about SandForce SSD controllers |
Editor:- SandForce SSD
controllers have been used in more industries and applications and by more
leading SSD manufacturers than any other SSD controller architecture.
More
than 30 SSD manufacturers and systems vendors worldwide (now including
Intel and
EMC) rely on
Seagate's SandForce
SSD processors to supply - what is in effect - a new industry standard for
high performance and reliability in a small form factor - enabled by the
company's DuraClass and other related technologies.
The historic
roots of this successful ecosystem started with a company called
SandForce - which
from the moment of unveiling its first product in
April 2009 -
changed the way that the SSD market viewed the IP inside the SSD - from being
an arcane subject - of interest to only a small select group of designers and
marketers - to becoming almost a cult fascination for those users who wanted
to know what the future would bring.
The SandForce product marketers
leveraged that acclaim in its
SandForce
Driven branding programs - designed to help it and its partners sell more SSDs
- which I wrote about in 2010 from a marketing angle in an article called -
Imprinting the brain
of the SSD
From my early conversations with the company's
management what shone through is that they started from knowing the silicon and
worked backwards from that to create an SSD architecture which rigorously
manages all the key aspects of unreliable raw flash (including MLC) and crafts
from that raw material new solid state storage drives which provide industry
leading IOPS and performance - with the data integrity and reliability needed
for the new SSD accelerated server age. All this - without using external RAM
caches too. The thinking behind this was impressive. But there was more to it
than that.
Multi-generation roadmaps were a key reason that oems liked
the SandForce way of doing things. For example the very 1st generation
SandForce flash controller supported 4 flash generations from 5Xnm down to 2Xnm.
When
the 3rd generation of SandForce controller - the SF-3700 - was launched in
November 2013 - I
said "the SF3700 (now sampling) is the most ambitious design of a single
chip SSD controller in SSD market history."
The ownership of
SandForce controller technology has changed 3 times.
It was acquired
by LSI in January
2012 - and then a few years later - in September 2014 - LSI's flash
business (including the controller and PCIe SSD product lines) was acquired by
Seagate.
I
speculated what business advantages Seagate might get from owning the SandForce
SSD architecture when the agreement was announced in
May 2014.
From
the perspective of today you can see what I've written in a new analysis
article - who's who in SSD?
- Seagate (September 2014) - which concludes with "No SSD
company is perfect and no SSD company has everything needed by the different
needs of the SSD market. But I now feel confident in saying that the new
SandForce driven Seagate has the potential to remain a long term resident within
the Top 10 SSD Companies List (companies which you absolutely have to look at if
you've got any new projects involving SSDs)."
If you want to
find out more about the SSD processors the links here - on the right -
provide an overview of publicly available documents about these key SSD
processor product families. To learn more take a look at the
SandForce
flash controllers overview page. | |
| overview of SandForce SSD
processors
|
- SF-3700
- launched in November 2013 - this 3rd generation SSD controller spans
applications from notebooks to enterprise arrays - with a jumper selectable
native 6Gbs SATA or gen 2 PCIe interface. Supports from 3 to 129 flash memory
devices via upto 9 channels. Preliminary spec is upto 150K / 80K R/W IOPS, upto
1.8GB/s R/W throughput when configured in PCIe SSD mode. Includes
adaptive DSP
technology and RAISE enhancements.
- SF-2400
SSD Processors - aimed at cloud computing - and launched in December 2011 -
this range enables the highest performance levels with 2xnm/2ynm MLC flash and
adds new tools for health management and over provisioning
- SF-2300
Industrial SSD Processors - supports 19nm, 20nm-class, and 30 nm-class SLC
and MLC flash memory - in industrial temperature operation - upto 512GB in a 1.8"
drive - up to 500 MB/s, 20 K IOPS - secure erase and encryption
|
| . |
| Architectural
overview of SandForce SSD controllers |
From an SSD architectural standpoint - and
using StorageSearch.com's
terminology -
SandForce SSD controllers can be summarized as follows:-
1st and
2nd generation products
- leveraged internal dedupe and compression to increase
efficiency
- classical meta market flash controller model for R/W timing and
ECC
- simple power management and performance options (2nd generation)
3rd
generation products (SF-3700 onwards)
- leveraged internal dedupe and compression to increase
efficiency
- very sophisticated power management and performance tradeoff options
| |
