SandForce
SandForce was an American semiconductor manufacturers without their own manufacturing in Milpitas, Calif., the, the core component for Solid State Drives (SSDs, colloquially chip disks) developed the SSD controller and sales. On January 4, 2012 SandForce was acquired by LSI Corporation and the Department of Flash memory components (Flash Components Division ) of LSI.
SandForce was founded in 2006 by Alex Naqvi and Rado Danilak, as a startup. In April 2009, the company entered the HDD market was announced.
SandForce SSDs never own sales, but the flash memory controller, called "SSD Processors ," for it to partner companies, which made the SSDs for consumers. Another group of companies of LSI uses the SandForce SSD controller in the range LSI Nytro PCIe. The market analyst Zsolt Kerekes and publisher of StorageSearch.com, called in 2011, SandForce -known manufacturer of SSD controllers.
History
Alex Naqvi and Rado Danilak brought experience from companies such as Marvell, Intel, NVIDIA, Toshiba, and SanDisk as they established SandForce. The end of 2009 it employed about 100 people.
On October 26, 2011 LSI Corporation announced plans to take over SandForce January 4, 2012. The acquisition was completed and the new SandForce Department of flash memory components of LSI, headed by Michael Raam.
Technology
SandForce sets in server environments a cost-effective MLC memory cells and puts them out for 5 years MTTF. Previously the more expensive SLC memory cells were used in servers. The term " DuraClass " wear controllers that do not have a DRAM cache for cost reasons. A proprietary data compression ( " Write Amplification ", English writing enhancement) reduces the amount of data to be written to non-volatile memory, and has positive effects on writing time and lifetime of the memory and is advertised with " DuraWrite ". " Write Amplification " is specified by SandForce based on average use 0.5. Data that can not be compressed as random data, encrypted file systems, or already compressed files like many common audio and video file formats are caused, written slowly through this feature. Other techniques such as error correction method, denoted by " RAISE " (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements, similar to RAID) are to minimize the failures. AES encryption which is operated in the background and the key obtained from the set via the BIOS hard disk password, the speed of data transfer is not affected.
Products
SandForce brought initially the SF -1000 family of SSD controllers on the market and divided the market into target groups for business (SF -1500 ) and home users (SF -1200 ) at a reference design documentation for the complete end product.
In October 2010, followed by a second -generation SF- 2000 SSD controller family for use in the business environment, in the extensions that support S- ATA 3.0 ( 6Gb / s ), higher speed, security and privacy features.
The second generation of home users (SF- 2500) came in February 2011 on the market and contains most extensions SF- 2000 family.
Problems
After introduction of the SF -2000 controller series complained some customers, their computers were stopped frozen or blue screen ( BSOD). Beginning of June 2011 prompted a recall of Corsair Memory SSDs with 120GB of the series " Force 3 " with corresponding serial numbers, the other Force 3 SSDs with SandForce SF -2000 controllers concerned, but were not in relation to this controller. In October 2011, SandForce firmware updates via the OCZ SSD manufacturers gave out, which solved the problems. In August 2012, it was reported on the website Tweaktown that would make the TRIM function does not work on SSDs with SandForce firmware 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 optimal if the SSD will be completely erased and confirmed that the firmware versions 5.0.3 and 5.0.4 the problem was resolved.
In 2012 it was found that SSDs only the encryption AES -128 supported with SF -2000 instead of the advertised AES -256. It has been suggested that the lower encryption standard was used to the U.S. to meet ITAR License with respect to some U.S. unlisted ambivalent or unfriendly countries.
Products like Kingston SSDNow V 200 and KC100 were umspezifiziert to support only the encryption AES -128.
Intel offered affected customers to refunds for the Intel SSD 520 Series to 1 October 2012. Kingston announced a replacement program including the shipping cost for affected customers who wanted to exchange.
Credentials
- Founded in 2006
- Company (California )
- Semiconductor manufacturers
- Milpitas