Switch to SSD 'for free'? Sandforce explains how

Fabless flash controller developer SandForce has let a pricing hint slip. It will reveal more of its plans and situation at the August 11-13 Flash Summit in Santa Clara. It may also be about to reveal its first supply deals. SandForce emerged from stealth in April with NAND flash solid state disk (SSD) controller technology that …

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Posted Tuesday 21st July 2009 13:11 GMT

Peter Kay

What a muppet - misleading claims #

240 73GB drives? Even SCA drives aren't limited to 73GB. 2TB SAS drives ship in 3Q2009, which are 27 times more capacious than a 73GB drive..

If you take nine 2TB SAS drives (243 '73GB drives') vs nine SSD, take a wild guess which will have the vastly larger capacity and lower cost..

Obviously IOPS will be much higher on the SSD, but they very conveniently fail to mention the erase timing. How does it perform once the SSD is full and has to erase and then write data to continue?

They claim to have 'recycling' technology to fix this - what's the impact on longevity? Why aren't they using hardware compression backed with 1:1 storage - after all, anything that reduces the amount written and maintains the amount of spare flash is to be welcomed.

Posted Tuesday 21st July 2009 15:07 GMT

Steve Foster

@Peter Kay #

SandForce are competing on throughput, not capacity. They're basically saying that's how many HDDs you'd need to match 9 SandForce SSDs for speed.

They've probably picked out 73GB drives just because they're the cheapest option on the HDD side, thus showing what the minimum saving would be (by buying SandForce). Either that, or this is an actual scenario they've been consulting on.

If you compare on capacity, obviously SSD gets slaughtered by HDD (today). Which is why SSD manufacturers are *not* targetting the capacity-hungry, but the speed-hungry customers.

Posted Thursday 23rd July 2009 19:46 GMT

Greg Goelz

What are the right performance specs? #

240 15K RPM drives could deliver 72,000 IOPS (@300 IOPS each). If Sandforce specs 30,000 IOPS, why does it take 9 SSDs versus 3 (72,000/30,000=2.4) to replace the 240 drives? Is the real performance for Sandforce closer to 8,000 IOPS? Which is the realitiy?

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