SandForce

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SandForce

logo
legal form Acquired by LSI Corporation
founding 2006
Seat Milpitas , California , USA
management Alex Naqvi, Rado Danilak
Number of employees 190
Branch Semiconductors, SSD controllers
Website www.sandforce.com

SandForce was an American semiconductor manufacturer without its own production in Milpitas , California , which developed and sold the SSD controllers , the core components for solid state drives (SSDs, commonly known as chip hard drives). On January 4, 2012, SandForce was acquired by LSI Corporation and the Flash Components Division was acquired by LSI. LSI was acquired by Avago Technologies on May 6, 2014 and continued as a brand. The following May 29, Seagate Technology announced that it would later purchase what began as SandForce from LSI, which Avago had acquired.

SandForce was founded as a startup in 2006 by Alex Naqvi and Rado Danilak . In April 2009 the entry into the hard disk market was announced.

SandForce never sold its own SSDs, but the flash memory controllers, known as “SSD processors”, did so to partner companies who manufactured the SSDs for end customers. Another group of LSI companies uses the SandForce SSD controllers in the LSI Nytro PCIe product line. In 2011, market analyst Zsolt Kerekes and editor of StorageSearch.com named SandForce the best-known manufacturer of SSD controllers.

history

Alex Naqvi and Rado Danilak brought experience from companies such as Marvell , Intel , NVIDIA , Toshiba , and SanDisk with them when they founded SandForce. At the end of 2009 they employed around 100 people.

On October 26, 2011, LSI Corporation announced that it would acquire SandForce on January 4, 2012. The acquisition has been completed and SandForce is the new flash memory components division of LSI, led by Michael Raam.

technology

SandForce uses inexpensive MLC memory cells in server environments and designs them for 5 years MTTF . Previously, the more expensive SLC memory cells were used in servers . Controllers that have no DRAM for cache memory for cost reasons are called "DuraClass" . A proprietary data compression ( " Write Amplification ", English writing gain ) reduces the amount of data to be written into the nonvolatile memory, and has a positive effect on write time and life of the memory and is applied with "DuraWrite". "Write Amplification" is given by SandForce with an average usage of 0.5. Data that cannot be further compressed, such as random data, encrypted file systems or files that have already been compressed, like many common audio and video file formats, are written more slowly due to this property. Other techniques such as error correction procedures , referred to as "RAISE" (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements, based on RAID ) are intended to minimize failures. AES encryption , which runs in the background and receives the key from the hard disk password set via the BIOS , does not affect the speed of the data transfer.

Products

SSD with SandForce controller

Sandforce initially launched the SF-1000 family of SSD controllers and divided the market segment into target groups for business (SF-1500) and home users (SF-1200) under a reference design with documentation for the complete end product.

In October 2010, the second generation of the SF-2000 family of SSD controllers for use in the business environment followed, including extensions to support S-ATA 3.0 (6 Gbit / s), higher speed, security and data protection functions.

The second generation for home users (SF-2500) was released in February 2011 and contains most of the SF-2000 family extensions.

Problems

After the introduction of the SF-2000 series of controllers, some customers complained that their computers were frozen or frozen with a blue screen ( BSOD ). At the beginning of June 2011, Corsair Memory initiated a recall of 120 GB SSDs of the "Force 3" series with corresponding serial numbers, which also affected other Force 3 SSDs with SandForce SF-2000 controllers, but were not related to this controller. In October 2011, SandForce released firmware updates through the SSD manufacturer OCZ , which fixed the problems. In August 2012 it was reported on the Tweaktown website that the TRIM function would not work optimally on SSDs with SandForce firmware 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 if the SSD was completely erased and confirmed that firmware versions 5.0.3 and 5.0.4 the problem has been resolved.

In 2012, it was found that SSDs with SF-2000 only supported AES-128 encryption instead of the advertised AES-256 . It has been suggested that the lower encryption standard was used to meet the US ITAR license for some of the US countries listed as ambivalent or unfriendly.

Products like Kingston SSDNow V + 200 and KC100 were re-specified to only support AES-128 encryption.

Intel offered affected customers reimbursements for the Intel SSD 520 series through October 1, 2012. Kingston announced an exchange including shipping costs for affected customers who requested the exchange.

credentials

  1. ↑ a b c LSI Completes Acquisition of SandForce, Inc. . PRNewswire.com. January 4, 2012. Retrieved April 16, 2012.
  2. ↑ a b c Mark Geenen: SandForce Emerges to Reshape SSD Landscape . TRENDFOCUS, Inc. Retrieved August 31, 2010.
  3. ↑ a b c SandForce - circa 2011 . In: StorageSearch.com web site . Retrieved May 20, 2013.
  4. ^ Hyde, Jennifer: Avago Technologies Limited (NASDAQ: AVGO) Moves Forward With LSI Deal . Financials trend. January 8, 2014. Archived from the original on October 13, 2017. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved January 28, 2014. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.financialstrend.com
  5. ^ Avago Technologies Completes Acquisition of LSI Corporation . Yahoo! Finance. Archived from the original on July 14, 2014. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved June 8, 2014. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / finance.yahoo.com
  6. ↑ Kristian Vättö: Seagate Acquires SandForce from LSI / Avago . AnandTech. Retrieved June 8, 2014.
  7. ↑ a b c d James Bagley: SandForce Enterprise Solid State Drive Processor with DuraClass Technology . StorageStrategiesNow. Retrieved August 31, 2010.
  8. ↑ Rick Merritt: Startup brings MLC to server flash drives . EETimes. Retrieved August 31, 2010.
  9. ^ A b c Mark Peters: SandForce - Forcing a Solid State Reconsideration . Enterprise Strategy Group. Retrieved August 31, 2010.
  10. ↑ a b Todd Erickson: SandForce seeks to improve SSD controllers . Retrieved August 31, 2010.
  11. ↑ Robert Hallock: SandForce nabs additional $ 21 million in funding . Icrontic. Retrieved August 31, 2010.
  12. ↑ a b c Charlie Demerjian: SandForce SSDs Break TPC-C Records . SemiAccurate. Retrieved August 31, 2010.
  13. ↑ Evaluation of SSD & Reference Design . SandForce. Retrieved August 31, 2010.
  14. ↑ SandForce SF-2000 Promises 500MBps over SATA 3.0 . FastestSSD.com. October 17, 2010. Retrieved November 7, 2010.
  15. ↑ SandForce Debuts SF-2000 SSD Processor Family . SandForce. October 17, 2010. Retrieved November 7, 2010.
  16. ↑ SandForce 2nd Generation SSD Processors Deliver Break-Through Client Computing User Experiences . SandForce. February 24, 2011. Retrieved June 3, 2011.
  17. ↑ Corsair Force Series 3 SSD Issue Resolution: Drive Return Procedure . Corsair. June 7, 2011. Retrieved August 24, 2011.
  18. ↑ SandForce Identifies Firmware Bug Causing BSOD Issue, Fix Available Today . Anandtech.com. October 17, 2011. Retrieved April 16, 2012.
  19. ↑ LSI SandForce 5 Series SSD Firmware - TRIM Lost and Found, Performance Investigated . TweakTown.com. August 1, 2012. Retrieved September 10, 2012.
  20. ↑ LSI SandForce AES Encryption Strength Flaw Revealed
  21. ^ SandForce SF-2000 encryption flaw discovered
  22. ↑ Kingston Technology statement on LSI SandForce SF-2000 encryption flaw
  23. ↑ 256-bit AES encryption broken in SandForce SSD controllers