Product showcase

And here's the PCB. This 6Gbps storage unit makes use of Intel (Micron) 20nm MLC written NAND.

 And there it is, on the right the SandForce 2281 controller can be seen. At total of 16 NAND flash memory ICs (8 on each side) can be spotted on the PCB. The NAND FLASH partitions are assigned to the LSI SandForce 2281 controller.

SandForce, opposed to other controllers, enforces a trick as they can write to the FLASH memory less than the competition needs to by using real time compression. The SF controllers store a representation of your data and not the actual data itself. It does that by using a partition of the available NAND flash memory. This is why on SandForce based drives you do not see an extra memory cache chip, which in fact saves on the bill of materials used for the SSDs, it will howevere make your available storage volume smaller, as Sandforce uses some of the NAND flash for compression. Now we mentioned it already, but the SF-2281 series controller will support up to roughly 500MB/s sequential read and write speeds, that's a good 62.5MB/s per one of the available eight channels. Combined the bandwidth is just exceptional for single non RAID drive. LSI SF-2281 controllers support TRIM. Deduct a few GB per partition for real-time data compression and then you have your SSD ready.

The one thing SSD and HDD manufacturers are quite horrible at is to show you the real number of GB your drive has AFTER formatting. This would be 223 MB. Above the controller, unfortunately it is unreadable.

Above 20nm MLC written memory. As stated, after formatting the end result for our 240 GB SSD is 223 GB after the NTSF format. We lost 8% = 17 GB right there without the drive even being used for storage.