LSI Deal Won't Change Availability of SandForce SSDs

By Marcus Yam
published

You'll still be able to get sand in all the places you wanted it before.

Yesterday LSI announced that it will be acquiring SandForce, which makes flash storage controllers for some of the fastest SSDs on the market.

This, of course, raised the question of what this would mean for the client, consumer and enthusiast spaces. We spoke to Steve Emerson, director of business development at LSI, who confirmed that SandForce will continue to offer its technology to products in the client market, which also includes the new ultrabook category.

In the enterprise market, Emerson confirmed that SandForce's technologies would help LSI developer differentiated solutions through tighter integrated flash memory and management. No time frame was given when we'd start seeing these enhanced offerings, though.

Emerson also spoke of a new advantage for both the client and enterprise space when it comes to SandForce offering its reference designs to system makers. Future reference designs will benefit from better integration and optimization of LSI and SandForce technologies. Hopefully this means a better and faster product as the end result.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • JohnnyLucky
    I am trying to figure out why SadForce sold out? Can't help but wonder if they might have hit some sort of development issue that might cause a major problem.
    Reply
  • billybobser
    seems to me (someone who knows nothing about this), is that the sandforce was not that amazing, but it's all we had.

    Ideally, some big tech peeps are working on something for this growing market, to spank these guys and raise the quality bar.

    Reply
  • dgingeri
    LSI (3Ware) controller with 4 integrated Sandforce 2600 controllers and an ARM processor for handling RAID calculations, all on one chip: onboard, SSD RAID class storage for the OS making 1U servers handle more storage and/or more IO for better performing servers in less space. I'm liking that idea.
    Reply
  • jacobdrj
    dgingeriLSI (3Ware) controller with 4 integrated Sandforce 2600 controllers and an ARM processor for handling RAID calculations, all on one chip: onboard, SSD RAID class storage for the OS making 1U servers handle more storage and/or more IO for better performing servers in less space. I'm liking that idea.LSI makes good stuff, so it seems. I am curious how this will go..

    What is more curious is how OCZ seems to have completely botched the acquisition of Indilix, with their Vertex Plus drives being completely unreliable, compared to the original Vertex, and in general, having fallen behind systems that use jMicron controllers (which used to be the laughing stock of the SSD world) in terms of reliability/performance ratio...
    Reply
  • proxy711
    jacobdrjWhat is more curious is how OCZ seems to have completely botched the acquisition of Indilix, with their Vertex Plus drives being completely unreliable, compared to the original Vertex, and in general, having fallen behind systems that use jMicron controllers (which used to be the laughing stock of the SSD world) in terms of reliability/performance ratio...OCZ uses Sandforce in its current SSDs(agility 3, solid 3, and vertex 3). The new drives they just announced are their first Indilix drives since the vertex plus gen, I believe, at least for their 2.5 drives.
    Reply
  • bildo123
    billybobserseems to me (someone who knows nothing about this), is that the sandforce was not that amazing, but it's all we had.Ideally, some big tech peeps are working on something for this growing market, to spank these guys and raise the quality bar.
    Pretty much this. Reading reviews I've read a lot of erroneous issues with sandforce based SSDs, even the newer ones.
    Reply