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If you are a fan of The SSD Review, you will remember our prediction of the inevitable Intel/SandForce partnership which goes back several months now.
Our first article was in March of this year where we were bombarded with e-mails and returns by those who were upset at such speculation. The second article followed in April after yet another Intel road map was leaked but carried some great details!
If you look at the 520 ‘Cherryville’ information on the below road map you will see the SSD sizes match that of only ‘SandForce Driven’ SSDs which brought forth our first clue that Intel and SandForce had finally come together in the SSD arena.
Today we can go one further and actually provide Intel specifications for you thanks to BouweenPC via T-Gathering. Click on the picture for high resolution shots!
If you look close, you will see the performance listed at 550MB/s read with 520MB/s write and 70,000IOPS at random 4k aligned write disk access. Intel has really gone to town with capacities adding on 60 and 180GB capacities to their originally planned 120, 240 and 480GB capacities reflected in the road map. Originally scheduled for release in November 2011, the drive has a great five year warranty and…what? No ‘SandForce Driven’ acknowledgement? Come on Intel!!!
It seems the only question left is whether it’s going to be a Christmas of New Years release!!! Congrats Intel!!!
UPDATE:
It seems that BouweenPC has even gotten a hold of the Product Brief which we have posted on the following page! Here is another by Softpedia that speaks to delay in release.
> If you look close, you will see the performance listed at 550MB/s read with 520MB/s write
Those specs are only for the 240GB version. See Footnote 1:
“Performance values vary by capacity.”
MRFS
I agree…no mention of the SF brand…pretty lame. Imo the delay until Q1 2012 is most probably cuz there are still some issues to be worked out beyond just the bsod issue. We all know that SF’s has always been full out-of-box compatibility…even the SF1200’s have left over issue to this day. I suspect that this extra time before release will be spent by LSI’s engineers blitzing the fw to iron out the last bits and then they can uncork some of their hellified qualification ability. No way Intel is coming to market with the current state of the drives/fw…ofc… Read more »
Excuse the typo….should be..
We all know that SF has always fallen short of full out-of-box universal compatibility…
Imagine how the entire IT industry would HOWL BLOODY MURDER if DDR3 SDRAM “write” performance were proportional to capacity. Let’s see, to drive this point home with an extreme example: 10 CONTINUE 32 GB @ 4 GBps 16 GB @ 2 GBps 08 GB @ 1 GBps 04 GB @ 500 MBps 02 GB @ 250 MBps 01 GB @ 125 MBps 512 MB (your abacus may be faster) We have “firmware” that will unlock these “throttles”, but you’ll have to pay more for the latest firmware. Now, repeat cycle with rotating platter storage: GO TO 10 Repeat cycle again… Read more »
With SSD controllers it’s all about parallelism. Most have 8 channels/16 bit lanes…for best results all 8 need to be utilized at once. Todays affordable nand memory chips are now up to 32GB or higher each. So a 128gb ssd would only have 4 nand chips leaving half of the controller totally unused…that’s why you see low performance with smaller drives. In the beginning nand chips were 8 or 16gb thus using all channels BUT the smaller nand is waaay to expensive cuz it’s not cost effective now days. Heh…you think it sux with SF, wait till you see the… Read more »