News - SandForce unveils next-gen controllers

[HEXUS]

SF-2000 steps up to SATA 6Gbps and nearly doubles transfer speeds.

Read more.

[aidanjt]

Oh dear, Intel. That's what happens when you sit on your ass, and pretend competition doesn't exist.

[Funkstar]

At what point do we hit the maximum speed of current flash memory technology?

Or do we just end up uzing dozens of smaller capacity chips and interleve them all?

[Pandora92]

Nice! Been waiting for this, can't wait to see them start hitting the retail space in the future.

Also lol'ing at how bad the specs make the just updated Intel drives look in comparison.

[GaryRW]

The competition will have to have a serious cost-per-gigabyte advantage to make up for being left in the dust by these new chips.

To be honest, I'd be more excited by a drive with the performance of a current Intel drive drive (more than enough for me) but at half or less of the current £/GB. I somehow suspect the difference between a HDD and SSD will be far more noticeable than the difference between e.g. the current and next-gen sandforce.

If much better performing drives from others means Intel has to compete fiercely on price, I'll be happy. The position over the last year or so seems to have been better performing drives, but not wonderfully better £/GB.

[semo]

Oh dear, Intel. That's what happens when you sit on your ass, and pretend competition doesn't exist.

it doesn't really. Nobody can match Intel's validation process and you will find their G2s are just as fast as the SF offerings in most cases (even if their respective datasheets say otherwise).

If there is anyone guilty of sitting on their hands in the SSD market, it is OCZ. It's no coincidence that their barefoot drives halved in price as soon as Intel released their 2nd gen SSDs. OCZ denied problems with their Core series SSDs right up till Anand put the spotlight on the bag of **** that was the Jmicron controller. Even then, OCZ's CEO condemned Anand's efforts in exposing the issue to the masses.

SSDs would not be where they are now if it wasn't for Intel to single handedly dictate pricing (indilinx still charge a pretty penny for their inferior controllers)

[redddraggon]

To be honest, I'd be more excited by a drive with the performance of a current Intel drive drive (more than enough for me) but at half or less of the current £/GB. I somehow suspect the difference between a HDD and SSD will be far more noticeable than the difference between e.g. the current and next-gen sandforce.

If much better performing drives from others means Intel has to compete fiercely on price, I'll be happy. The position over the last year or so seems to have been better performing drives, but not wonderfully better £/GB.

I pretty much agree. At the current prices and capacities the speeds are fast enough, and without quantitative testing I couldn't tell the difference between the different speed SSDs I've used.

As a "consumer" I'd much rather there was a concentration to produce large capacity drives at the current speeds than super fast drives at low capacities.

I suppose the SSD market is aimed more at "enterprise"/"business" than for the "consumer"/"amateur" market though, which is far enough.

[Ciber]

Coming soon, but how soon?

[semo]

To be honest, I'd be more excited by a drive with the performance of a current Intel drive drive (more than enough for me) but at half or less of the current £/GB. I somehow suspect the difference between a HDD and SSD will be far more noticeable than the difference between e.g. the current and next-gen sandforce.

If much better performing drives from others means Intel has to compete fiercely on price, I'll be happy. The position over the last year or so seems to have been better performing drives, but not wonderfully better £/GB.

Whilst I totally agree with your first paragraph, I think you need to look back in time a little and you will notice how fierce Intel have been with their pricing (as I've mentioned in my other post). I'm quite happy with SSDs pricing trend at the moment. It used to be that OCZ's 60GB Vertex 1 drives cost more than Intel's 80GB but now you can get a 60GB Vertex 2 for £100. Plenty of storage for a boot drive at a reasonable UNIT PRICE (anyone that brings up the illogical argument of price/GB difference of HDD vs. SSD deserves a slap).

Speaking of the Vertex 2, I stuck one in a 2-3 year old laptop a few weeks ago and I haven't had a happier client till now. It was the usual, "can you make my computer quicker" request to which I often had to reply "yes but not by much".

[Hicks12]

very good speeds! However as already mentioned we are at the point when we dont need more speed (albeit welcomed) we need better price per GB before hand. Dont the sandforce controller drivers have problems with performance after a few weeks of usage? Or is it just limited to OCZ drives? Cause to me that eliminates one of the main points of an SSD, reliability and performance... if you lose that performance after 2 weeks then its not really reliable and just an expensive paperweight that makes a HDD look better!.

Sort that problem out and get the price down to £1/GB then I will be very easily swayed to buying one ~£50-£60 .

[dangel]

it doesn't really. Nobody can match Intel's validation process

Mmm probably can for their bloody firmware - as a gen 2 drive owner who got shafted by said

Anyway - interesting but until consumer drives get this it's effectively irrelevant to me

[GaryRW]

Whilst I totally agree with your first paragraph, I think you need to look back in time a little and you will notice how fierce Intel have been with their pricing

I agree - I remember when the G2 launched (last year, or 2008??). That was a massive cut in price per GB.

& just to be clear, I also with with you on unit price & I'm not comparing to the cost per GB of HDD's - I just want a decent sized OS drive at around £100. Ideally 100GB+, but I'd settle for 80 gig. I've been tempted by the recent smallish price drops, but the promise of much larger price drops or more capacity from the Intel G3's has made me wait.

[aidanjt]

it doesn't really. Nobody can match Intel's validation process and you will find their G2s are just as fast as the SF offerings in most cases (even if their respective datasheets say otherwise).

If there is anyone guilty of sitting on their hands in the SSD market, it is OCZ. It's no coincidence that their barefoot drives halved in price as soon as Intel released their 2nd gen SSDs. OCZ denied problems with their Core series SSDs right up till Anand put the spotlight on the bag of **** that was the Jmicron controller. Even then, OCZ's CEO condemned Anand's efforts in exposing the issue to the masses.

SSDs would not be where they are now if it wasn't for Intel to single handedly dictate pricing (indilinx still charge a pretty penny for their inferior controllers)

We're talking about Sandforce (with me hinting at Intel's recent Gen 3 info leaks), and you're going off on an Barefoot/JCrapron tangent, why?

Furthermore, Sandforce has formally announced this controller product. Still no official word from Intel on either a new product, or price reductions for what is already more than a year old product.

They're dragging their asses.

[ultrasbm]

I bought myself a 256Gb SATAIII Crucial C300 SSD and haven't looked back!

A "bargain" at £380 ;-)

[Agent]

Nice! Been waiting for this, can't wait to see them start hitting the retail space in the future.

Also lol'ing at how bad the specs make the just updated Intel drives look in comparison.

The problem is, the Sandfoce specs are LOLTASTIC. Their rated read/write speeds are nothing short of a lie over sustained use.
Sure, you can hit them in some very specific situations like when the GC map isn't fully in place, you've not written too much to the drive recently, you have free space on the NAND to allow the GC to kick in, and the data is highly compressable (yes I'm serious - you fall out of these and their speeds plummet).

I've raised this in a few other posts, but You only need to look at OCZs own forums where plenty of users are showing how much of a huge decrease in speed Sandforce drives can have when in real world use. They are still fast, yes, but close to their market specs? No.

[borandi]

However, in the past, the only difference between the consumer and professional controllers has been the firmware, meaning that the next generation of super-fast consumer SSDs could be with us very soon.

The industrial and enterprise drives have flash memory rated for a longer write lifetime - often into the TB rather than the GB (per bit).