News Sandforce SATA 6Gbps SSDs sampling in Q3

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/06/16/sandforce-sata-6gbps-ssd-sampling-in-q3/1

 

great news, but i will wait for the second revision thanks (price permitting)

 

Time to sell my Intel X25M 160gb... before it becomes too cheap

 

Will be very interesting to follow this one. 520MB read and write would be pretty exceptional. I wonder what it'll be priced at? (>£3 per GB?)

 

We'll be limited by NAND speeds surely? not to mention the price of NAND that will operate at those speeds. Bet these'll be SLC only...

 

I like the sound of this, but I have a few questions.

1) Will the NAND become a bottleneck if the controller is that fast? How fast (in theory) can NAND be written to?
2) Will they be using this chip to make small fast cheap drives, or make the same mistake as current manufacturers who make large higher priced drives that people can't afford? (technically I guess that's not down to Sandforce.)
3) A General question. How easy will it be to clone my OS on my current HDD to a new SSD? I hate doing fresh installs. I guess Acronis True Image can do it?
4) Will it support TRIM? I'm assuming so, but a confirmation would be good.

It'll be interesting to see what Indilinx have up their sleeve to combat this. They must have had time to develop a new controller since Barefoot came out.

 

I wish companies would be more open about their random read/writes. Sequential speeds are all well and good when cloning drives, copying across large (or lots of) files etc, but the real difference from moving to an SSD is the crazy increase in random speeds.

Last time I checked, Sanforce were ahead of Intel's current G2 drives in randoms, but with Intel's G3 coming out in not too long, it would be really nice to see some random speeds, instead of the "Just put the biggest numbers out" approach.

It should be interesting when both drives are out.

 

If the NAND isn't fast enough to switch at that speed, you add channels.
More channels = more throughput, at the same switching speed.

My lowly 30Gb Kingston drive with Toshiba controller has 4 Channels.
The much better indilinx Barefoot et Al have 8 channels I think.

This will prob be 16 or 32 channels...we'll see

 

To answer your question #3
You will want to use a disk cloning software. The simplest one I found was
"xxclone" just google disk cloning.

 

Still not the fastest Nanda flash option, this is still a faster way to do it:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-051-OC&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1427

But it will still be slower then a RAM drive

 

There's a (new?) 96gb ocz vertex out
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/96GB...ead-235MB-s-Write-170MB-s-64MB-Cache-17K-IOPS

Looks like decent value too.

 

The quoted speeds there are not really any faster. (20MB/s faster read, 30MB/s slower write) Plus it uses two controller chips in RAID 0.

 

That does look good.

 

Thus no TRIM support.

 

Nice. Keep them coming, bigger, faster, cheaper. Maybe in 6 months I'll finally buy one.

 

Still ~£2/GB, which is what it's been for a while.

There are many faster 'SSDs' that use a direct PCI-E link (OCZ have released products, ioDrive was one of the first if not 'the' first - just don't look at the price!) and use various types of NAND, number of channels and type of controllers.

It's encouraging and daunting to hear that the 'next generation' are already slated to hit the maximum throughput of SATA 6Gbit and perhaps that's why OCZ were showing off more products for by-passing the SATA/SAS ports on the motherboard.

Exciting times. Still, a 30GB SSD is still too expensive when you think about it.

 

just as i was ready to finally get a SSD, i'll wait a bit more then, maybe prices go down (probably not ) or something.

 

I'm waiting till trim is internal or standard and not OS dependent and works in RAID

 

I was expecting 6xxMB/s, i guess i was expecting too much.

 

you can't go higher than max theoretical.