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OCZ first to market with enterprise-class SSDs using the SF-1500 controller

Last month SandForce announced its SF-1500 controller firmware was shipping in its MP, or mass production release. Thursday, OCZ unveiled the Vertex 2 Pro and Vertex 2 EX SSDs based on the SF-1500.

While identical at a hardware level to the SF-1200 consumer controller, the SF-1500 differs substantially in its firmware, features and test requirements. The SF-1500 also has an option for a DRAM cache and a super capacitor to keep the circuit alive so the dynamic cache can be flushed to the flash memory if a power failure occurs. Both the Vertex 2 Pro and Vertex 2 EX have this feature.

The Vertex 2 Pro is based on 34nm 2-bit per cell Multi-Level Cell (MLC) flash, while the Vertex 2 EX uses 34nm Single Level Cell (SLC) that will endure about ten times the program/erase cycles of the MLC and is recommended for applications that are write intensive. The flash is currently produced at the Intel-Micron foundry, but OCZ is free to qualify and purchase anyone’s flash. Both drives come in a 2.5” format and support the Serial ATA II (SATA II) interface. Also, a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface will be made available to clients using LSI SAS bridge silicon. Enhanced error correction (ECC) is used to provide more data to detect and correct errors. This flies in close formation with the AES 128 encryption which involves similar calculations as the ECC algorithm.

Transfers are rated at 285Mb/sec for reads and 275Mb/sec for writes, and 4K random writes achieve a remarkable 50,000 Input-Outputs per second (IOPs). The many reviews of the SF-1200 based products have verified the tremendous reduction of the write penalty inherent with flash, which involves special algorithms for compression and dedupe, again in close formation with the encryption processing.

As is the trend, 50GB, 100GB and 200GB versions will be available, reflecting the formatted capacities from 64GB, 128GB and 256GB raw capacity respectively. Warranty is three years. Pricing and shipment schedule was not available.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2010 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Bagley's bITes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. // Both Comments and Pings are open ?> You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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