If you’ve been following the SandForce story over the past couple years, you’ll know that it’s been quite a ride for SandForce and their upcoming SF3700 SSD controller. Shortly after announcing the LSI SandForce SF3700 back in late 2013, LSI, the then owner of SandForce controller technology, was acquired by Avago who then turned around and sold LSI’s Flash Components Division to Seagate within the same year. As such, the SandForce SF3700 controller faced multiple delays which may or may not have been expected given SandForce’s original expectation of SF3700’s arrival by the end of last year.

Obviously an end of 2014 launch of [...]

Earlier this year I visited Kingston at CES, and while it’s typically uncommon with memory companies to unveil a ton of new stuff, Kingston actually had quite the showing with the centerpiece of it all being their new HyperX Predator PCIe SSD. Of course, this wasn’t the first time Kingston had showed off the HyperX Predator. Back at Computex last year, Kingston was extremely excited to show off early prototypes of the HyperX Predator although I had my doubts whether it’d come to market within a reasonable timeframe. The reason for this is because up until the HyperX Predator, Kingston had never been in the PCIe SSD market [...]

Two months ago, we had the opportunity to be one of the first reviewers to take a look at the Crucial MX100 SSD. At the time, we came away very impressed with the drive as it delivered great performance, great features and is backed by Crucial’s fantastic track record for reliability while still being one of the least expensive SSDs on the market.

Unfortunately, Crucial only sent us the 256GB version of the MX100 at the time, which is a lower performing drive than the 512GB version of the product. While were more than happy to review the more commonly purchased 256GB capacity, the smaller capacity drive is at a substantial disadvantage when [...]

Ever since LSI SandForce (now Seagate) first announced their highly anticipated SF3700 controller late last year, we’ve never really received a definitive answer on when SSDs using the upcoming controller would be shipping… until now. In a recent interview at FMS with Kent Smith, Sr. Director of Product Management Flash Components Division at LSI, we were told that SSDs with the SF3700 are expected to ship by the end of the year.

In our discussions with SandForce, their message  appears to be similar to the message we received at Computex earlier this year. SandForce is touting not only 100% read/write performance, but also mixed workload performance [...]

After announcing the SandForce SF3700 back in November of last year, LSI SandForce and their board partners have been relatively quiet on the upcoming controller. At CES earlier this year, we were hopeful that LSI was going to announce that drives with the SF3700 would be shipping soon, but instead we were greeted with news that they were still working on the firmware to lower heat/increase performance, and it wouldn’t be until 2H 2014 when SSDs would begin shipping with the upcoming controller.

For Computex then, we were confident that LSI SandForce would announce that they had begun shipping the SF3700 series controllers, but once again we were disappointed [...]

With LSI’s SandForce division changing hands numerous times within a matter of months and the seemingly endless delays with SandForce’s long anticipated SF3700 series controller, even SandForce’s largest partners are looking into different controller options for their upcoming SSD offerings.

At a recent HyperX event here at Computex, Kingston recently introduced a new HyperX PCIe x4 SSD this time around with a Marvell 88SS9293 (Codename Altaplus) controller. The HyperX SSD is also paired with Toshiba’s latest 2nd generation 19nm toggle mode MLC NAND.

Kingston didn’t provide much additional information about the upcoming [...]

It really hasn’t been all that long since Avago acquired LSI in a $6.6 Billion cash deal and it looks like things are getting shuffled around once again.

This morning, Seagate shook the flash storage industry by announcing plans to acquire both LSI’s Accelerated Solutions Division (ASD) and Flash Components Division (FCD) from Avago for a not-too-shabby $450 million. The deal is expected to close Q3 2014 pending regulatory approval.

This gives Seagate a strong position in the both the enterprise and client flash storage arena and is a huge win for the company, finally giving Seagate an in-house flash storage controller. Current generation Seagate [...]

CES 2014 was big for LSI SandForce and OWC, being one of SandForce’s oldest partners, had plenty to show for that as well.

Pulled directly from OWC CEO Larry O’Connor’s pocket, we were able to get a glimpse of a working sample of OWC’s upcoming M.2 form factor SandForce SF3700 based SSD. Hardware-wise, OWC M.2 SSD we saw featured a LSI SandForce SF3739 controller paired with SanDisk 19nm MLC flash with performance capable of up to 1,800MB/s read/writes.

Given OWC’s love for Apple, OWC has told us that they’re planning on producing these M.2 form factor drives in both PCIe x2 and PCIe x4 as drop-in replacements for [...]

On the storage side of things, PCIe and M.2 form-factor SSDs were the talk of CES 2014 and memory/storage giant Kingston made sure their bases were covered on that front.

Like a number of other SandForce partners, Kingston showed off their first ever PCIe SSD which they’ve dubbed the Kingston HyperX Predator. The HyperX Predator is a SandForce SF3700 powered PCIe SSD, which is capable of up to 1800 MB/s sequential read/write performance and up to ~150,000 IOPS 4K random write performance.

No official word on pricing or launch dates, but it seems like the general consensus among SandForce partners on the launch of the SandForce SF3700 based SSDs [...]

ADATA always brings a ton of cool technology to CES and CES 2014 is no different. Along with their full line of SSDs, ADATA showed off some new SandForce SF3700 powered SSDs such as the 2TB XPG SX930 pictured above. While the XPG SX930 will be using SATA 6Gb/s interface, ADATA tells us that similar SandForce SF3700 powered 2TB SSDs will be available with faster interfaces as SATA-Express, SFF-8639, and M.2 become more readily available.

To show off the true potential of PCIe storage, ADATA hooked up one of their latest SandForce SF3700 powered SSDs and benchmarked it at a phenomenal 1,800+ MB/s. ADATA tells us that performance on the upcoming SF3700 powered [...]