SandForce, a relatively unknown company based out of Saratoga, California, announced the release of a line of Solid State Drive processors that insist on brazenly pushing the envelope in that particularly competitive industry niche. The SF-1000 SD Processor family are, according to SandForce’s press release, “highly-integrated silicon devices [that] address the inherent endurance, reliability, and data retention issues associated with NAND flash memory, making it possible to build SSDs that deliver unprecedented performance over the life of the drive with orders-of-magnitude higher reliability than enterprise-class HDDs (Hard Disk Drives).”

A patent-pending and trademarked technology known as DuraClass comprises a distinctive set of flash management features that work towards a bottom line of Solid State Drive reliability and performance. DuraClass includes the following technological innovations:

• A trademarked process called DuraWrite which optimizes the number of program cycles to extend flash-rated endurance by a factor of eighty or more.
• Intelligent garbage collection with minimal flash endurance impact, a system known as Recycler.
• Optimization of wear leveling algorithms, which extends the life of the flash system; this technology is known as Wear Leveling and Monitoring.
• Single-drive RAID-like protection and recovery from potentially disastrous block or die failure.

The SD-1000 family processors operate with a 3 gigabit-per-second SATA interface, which can connect up to half a terabyte of NAND flash memory. It also delivers 250 MB/S performance with a hair-splitting 100 micro-second latency. A quick bottom line? The extraordinary leap in processing power really all comes down to random write performance.

New SSDs with the SandForce processors should be in production later this year.