OCZ Vertex 3 Pro SandForce SF-2000 Based SSD Preview

At the heart of the upcoming Vertex 3 Pro SSD is a brand new controller from SandForce, the SF-2582. The SF-2582 is a member of the upcoming SandForce SF-2000 family of SSD processors, which was announced a few months back. The new SF-2000 SSD processor family builds upon the success of the current SF-1500 / SF-1200 series by adding 6Gb/s SATA III interface support, integrating a more powerful encryption engine, and adding support for new flash memory types. While new, the SF-2000 family does, however, leverage technologies from the previous generation.  As such, we'd recommend checking out some of our previous SandForce coverage for some back-story on SandForce and what makes their SSD controllers so sought after. In our look at the OCZ Vertex Limited Edition, we go into detail on DuraWrite and RAISE and some of SandForce's other proprietary technologies. We highly recommend checking that story out.

Back to the issue at hand. Along with virtually all of the features of the previous-generation, the SandForce SF-2000 SSD processor family will offer SAS-bridge support for non-512 byte sectors, enhanced ECC and BCH capabilities, and it features new Power / Performance throttling technology for more “green” computing environments. All of the features culminate in a new controller that’s capable of over 500MB/s sequential reads and writes, with roughly 60,000 random 4K IOPS according to SandForce. And just to give you a little taste before moving on to the next few pages, even at this early beta stage, the Vertex 3 Pro is already hitting those performance levels.

SandForce SF-2000 Block Diagram

With this new line of SSD processors, SandForce will first be introducing products into enterprise space, but new products will eventually trickle down into the consumer space as well. Due to OCZ's close working relationship with SandForce, it comes as no surprise that the first SF-2000 based SSD to land in the labs comes by way of OCZ, but expect many of SandForce's current partners (and perhaps a few more) to jump on board and offer products based on the SF-2000 family as well.

Additionally, we've got some more specifics regarding the new SF-2000 SSD processors direct from the source. The breakdown of new features, direct from SandForce is as follows:

• Support for advanced 30nm- and 20nm-class Flash with Asynch/ONFi2/Toggle interfaces with data rates up to 166 Mega Transfers per second
   
• Enhanced dual-ported SAS bridge support, including non-512-byte sector sizes, e.g., 520, 524, 528, 4K, etc., with Data Integrity Field (DIF) for true Enterprise-class SAS drive behavior and performance
   
• TCG Enterprise security with selectable multi-banded 256/128-bit AES encryption with line-rate double encryption for data written to the drive
   
• Advanced ECC engine correcting up to 55 bits per 512-byte sector to assure high data integrity and support for future generations of Flash memory
   
• Power and performance throttling options to support green computing initiatives
   
• Industrial temperature support (-40 to +85 degrees Celsius)