SSD Primer and SandForce Controller

If you're new to SSDs or just want a fantastic in-depth review of the technology along with real-world testing, check out this anandtech.com article. If you're looking for a more recent analysis of SSD products, checkout this March article, also from anandtech.com.

The SandForce controller has been getting a lot of press lately, following on the heels of the Indilinx controller. Here's a review of a new Corsair SSD with the SandForce controller.

The SandForce controller takes a different approach than other SSD controllers and has introduced deduplication and the RAID concept to NAND cells. They call their RAID approach RAISE (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements). Checkout more here.

OCZ PCI-e SSD with field-replaceable MLC NAND

OCZ is ready to mass produce it’s PCI-e SSDs with field replaceable MLC NAND flash modules.

This makes the MLC versus SLC debate a bit moot if you can just replace the NAND when it wears out like a bad disk. Did I mention that it has 8 separate Indlinx controllers, up to 2TBs of space, and has peak transfer rates of 1.4GB/s for reads and writes (that’s gigabytes not gigabits)? I can’t imagine what will happen with a Sandforce controller version of one of these monsters.

This is some seriously interesting temporary storage for a virtualization cluster that needs some fast DAS. With 2 TB, you could carve up 87 gigabytes for 23 VMs on a 24-core virtualization box. That’s mighty interesting.