SandForce was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Milpitas, California, that designed and manufactured flash memory controllers for solid-state drives (SSDs). On January 4, 2012, SandForce was acquired by LSI Corporation and became the Flash Components Division of LSI.
SandForce was founded in 2006 by Alex Naqvi and Rado Danilak, as a startup company. In April 2009, they announced their entrance into the solid-state drive market.
SandForce did not sell complete solid-state drives, but rather flash memory controllers, called SSD processors, to partners who then built and sold complete SSDs to manufacturers, corporations, and end-users.[6] However, another division of LSI uses the SandForce SSD processor in the LSI Nytro PCIe product line. The key component of any SSD is actually the controller, upon which SandForce focuses. Zsolt Kerekes, an SSD Market Analyst and publisher of StorageSearch.com, said in 2011 that SandForce was the best-known maker of SSD controllers.
Technology
SandForce uses inexpensive MLC flash memory in an enterprise computing environment with a 5-year expected life. At the time the company emerged from stealth mode, other solid-state drives in the enterprise were using the more expensive SLC flash memory.
SandForce gave the name "DuraClass" to the overall technology incorporated in its controllers. SandForce controllers do not use DRAM for caching which reduces cost and complexity compared to most other SSD controllers. SandForce controllers also use a proprietary compression system to minimize the amount of data actually written to non-volatile memory (the "write amplification") which increases speed and lifetime for most data (known as "DuraWrite"). SandForce claims to have reduced write amplification to 0.5 on a typical workload. As a byproduct, data that cannot readily be compressed (for example random data, encrypted files or partitions, compressed files, or many common audio and video file formats) is slower to write. Other features include error detection and correction technology known as "RAISE" (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements) which improves the disk failure rates, and AES encryption which works in the background and is completely automatic. It is linked to the BIOS password and encrypts the user data at the full speed of the data as it passes through the controller.
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