OCZ samples twin-core ARM SSD controller

OCZ is sampling a new flash controller that gives a picture of future solid state drives.

The company bought Indilinx for its solid state drive (SSD) controller technology in March this year and has now unveiled the Indilinx Everest controller platform.

It has a 6Gbit/s SATA III interface, a dual-core ARM processor and a number of enticing features, such as 3-bit multi-level cell (MLC) support. This is going to be called TLC, for triple-level cell, to distinguish it from today's MLC, which is 2-bit MLC.

OCZ said the platform will support flash process geometries down to the 19-10nm range (1x). Today we have flash in the 39-30nm range (3x) which is transitioning to 29-20nm (2X). With each downwards jump the number of flash dies on a wafer increases and the cost/die shrinks.

OCZ says Everest supports up to 200 mega-transfers/sec whereas today's controllers, such as the Sandforce ones used by OCZ, support up to 166MT/sec or so. The device also supports 1TB capacity SSDs and has an 8-channel design with 16-way interleaving that supports ONFI 2.0 and Toggle 1.0. This will provide sequential bandwidth up to 500MB/sec.

There is a 400MHz DDR3 DRAM cache facility that can support up to 512MB of such cache. The controller is optimised for 8K writes – which matches, the 8K page size typical of the latest flash, OCZ says.

SSDs powered by this controller can have their boot time cut in half compared to today's controllers because of OCZ's boot-reduction time algorithms. This, OCZ says, will support "instant on" requirements.

It supports TRIM, SMART, NCQ with a queue depth of 32, 70-bit ECC, and many over-provisioning options to extend the SSD's working life. It also has OCZ proprietary Ndurance technology to extend flash's working life.

OCZ says it is available for evaluation now by OEMs and, we presume, OCZ will be using it in its own flash products. We're looking at 1TB SSDs using TLC flash, shipping sequential data out at 500MB/sec which boot quickly, and could be combined to provide multi-TB flash data stores. Parallelising data access would provide multi-GB/sec I/O. The flash future looks bright. ®

OCZ samples twin-core ARM SSD controller ? The Register

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3Fees

 

Hmmm...

Two ways I look at this:

One, even OCZ is sick of SandForce based junk.

Two, if QC continues at OCZ as it has been... just more junk from OCZ.


Either way, I might be evaluating this in summer of 2015 - if they're still around (the new Indilinx controller, I mean).

 

Agreed and agreed.

 

The Indilinx team had a better track record(well at least quality wise), would it go down hill just being bought by OCZ ?

 

With OCZ's track record the last couple years, quite possibly. I'm going to wait and see first, but OCZ mistreated me BADLY last fall and I have sworn off their products until their Customer Service massively improves and they stop releasing horribly broken products.

 

The Vertex 3 already needs more power than most 2.5" drives, I can't imagine that stuffing in a high end smartphone/tablet CPU is going to help that.

Besides, didn't IMFT say that TLC flash is not suitable for SSDs when they announced it last year?

 

don't you see that they are just throwing all hot terms in the press release ? Why would smartphone/tablet need this kind of speed ? they simply don't need SSD.

 

Perhaps I missed the point, but all smartphones/tablets use some form of SSD, and the press release never mentioned smartphones or tablets.

 

While tablets may use SSD's, no smartphones I know do.

They don't need that kind of write speed, nor the additional battery drain of a 'real' SSD.

They simply use flash storage (similar to a USB key - nothing like an SSD at all).

 

@tiller

thank you.