SandForce, a leading designer of controllers for solid-state drives, this week announced the first public demonstration of its SSD processors working in concert with the industry’s most aggressive NAND flash family for SSD applications, 24nm multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash from Toshiba.

The demonstration featured the company’s SATA SF-2000 SSD controller with SATA-600 interface with read and write speeds up to 500MB/s and up to 60 000 IOPS with Toshiba’s 24nm toggle DDR flash memory operating at 166MT/s. It is unclear whether SandForce used Toshiba’s MLC memory with two-bits-per cell (2bpc) or three-bits-per-cell (3bpc) architecture. The latter type is not used for solid-state drives generally due to lower reliability which can be overcome with sophisticated SSD controllers

This product combination enable SandForce partners to produce more affordable SSD products which will further accelerate adoption in the enterprise, client, and industrial computing markets that demand optimized reliability, performance, and power efficiency, according to the company.

“Our award winning DuraClass technology includes a number of features enabling the industry’s highest level of reliability, endurance, performance, and power efficiency in a single SSD Processor solution. We worked closely with Toshiba to expand DuraClass with additional advanced read recovery techniques vital to the successful operation of SSDs that use more aggressive NAND Flash process nodes,” said Thad Omura, vice president of marketing at SandForce.

SandForce SSD Processors use innovative DuraClass technology with RAISE and patented and patent pending DuraWrite to optimize the entire user computing experience. To date, SandForce has shipped well over 2 million SF-1000 and SF-2000 SSD controllers through more than 30 SSD manufacturers in 18 months.

Gartner market research firm predicts SSD unit shipments in the three target markets will surpass 66 million units in 2014, a 61% compound annual growth rate from 2010 shipments.

Tags: 24nm, Toshiba, SandForce, NAND, Flash, SSD