Tag Archives: SMI

Controllers are the heart and soul of every SSD. Without one, an SSD would be a useless PCB with some components slapped on it. It is responsible for everything from garbage collection and wear leveling to error correction and hardware encryption. In simple terms, all these operations can be quite complicated to implement as well as expensive to develop. This …

Every now and then, we are fortunate to have SSDs reach our bench that one might not normally find within every day PC systems or servers.  Our review today of the Super Talent DuraDrive AT7 SSD is just that; a SSD fully intended for the automobile industry, and more specifically In-vehicle Infotainment Systems.  Unlike other examples that we have reviewed …

While at Pepcom’s Digital Experience! 2015 in Las Vegas, NV, we were quite interested in what was going on at the PNY booth. They have announced a new line-up of SSDs for enterprise, client, and consumer applications. The naming scheme has also changed from before, now opting for a two letter abbreviation per drive class followed by a number series. …

We were privileged yesterday to meet with Robert Fan, Vice President and General Manager of Silicon Motion to discuss their latest SSD controller, the SM2256, which features support for TLC NAND.  Historically, TLC NAND has had a reputation of having low endurance and reliability, and hence was not suitable for use in solid state storage devices.  Fast-forward to today, and …

In last week’s SSD of the Week we highlighted AMD’s first entry into the SSD market, their Radeon R7. It is a gamer oriented drive that has been developed with OCZ to deliver some great performance. This week we are starting off 2015 by recommending a great performing drive at very good price points, the ADATA SP610. The SP610 comes …

Silicon Motion Technology Corporation, a world-leading designer and marketer of NAND flash controllers for solid-state storage devices, is announcing the SM2256 6Gb/s SSD controller.  The SM2256 represents the world’s first complete merchant ASIC/firmware SATA 6Gb/s controller supporting triple-level cell (TLC) 1x/1y/1znm NAND from all major NAND producers. The SM2256 features Silicon Motion’s proprietary NANDXtend technology.  This state-of-the-art error detection and …

Silicon Motion (SMI)  has met with success as of late with release of their  SM2246EN SATA 3 SSD controller.  It was just under a year ago that we sat with Robert Fan to discuss the future of SM2246EN, while today it can be found in the PNY Optima, Corsair LX, as well as the ADATA SP610 of this report. Our …

ADATA Technology, a leading producer of DRAM modules and NAND Flash devices, is announcing the launch of the Premier SP610 2.5″ SATAIII (6Gb/s) solid state drive (SSD).  Featuring a Silicon Motion (SMI) controller, ADATA’s Premier SP610 consistently maintains high read and write speeds to enhance performance stability, and also utilizes advanced BCH ECC (Error Correction Code) technology.  This makes the …

The importance of SSD controllers often gets overlooked in the world of SSDs.  Memory itself is front and center in the minds of most, simply because it is the most prominent component in any SSD.  Most recently, we are even seeing Apple using the term ‘flash’ in its product literature , rather than ‘SSD’.  Not only is the controller capable …