SandForce is quite possibly the brightest star in the SSD galaxy at the moment – represented on the market by exceptionally popular drives such as the Vertex 2 from OCZ and Corsair F120. But until now drives with the SandForce controller have been restricted to the SATA 2 interface, which has its limits. Some drives now exceed the 300MBps limit imposed by the platform, which is why it’s time for an upgrade.
With its upcoming SATA 3.0 (6.0 Gbps) compatible SF-2000 controller, SandForce is promising read and write speeds of 500 Megabytes per second. So far two members of the 2000-series have been announced: SF-2500 and SF-2600. Both have been developed primarily for the business segment, but it seems likely that they will also end up in enthusiast-class consumer drives.
“We are building on the success of our first generation product now in production with multiple Enterprise OEMs by introducing the SF-2000 family that offers significant feature and performance enhancements for our rapidly expanding customer base of trusted SandForce Driven Enterprise and Industrial SSD manufacturers,” says SandForce CEO.
The promised 500MB/s read and write capability of the SF-2500 and 2600 can be compared to the 250/170MB/s that Intel promises with its own third-generation SSDs. Furthermore, random writes of 4KB files will supposedly reach 60,000 IOPS with the new controller, which would make the market leaders in this regard.
The SF-2500/2600 will also be able to take advantage of 20nm NAND flash and come in capacities up to 512GB. No official launch date has been given, but the first drives are expected to show up in the first half of 2011.