While SSDs are well known for their very low access times due to no moving parts, up until recently, traditional hard drives were still in the lead for sustained throughput, particularly when configured in a RAID setup.  Now, Indilinx has developed a new solid state drive (SSD) controller, product name Barefoot, which claims to provide up to 230MB/s throughput, according to this MarketWatch report.  The controller supports a capacity of up to 512GB using MLC based NAND flash.

The Barefoot controller features native SATA2 (3Gbps) support and can provide read and write speeds of up to 230MB/s and 170MB/s with SLC based Flash and 200MB/s and 160MB/s with MLC based flash respectively.  This performance is achieved by the controller operating 4 independent channels and an external DRAM buffer.  It is manufactured using 90nm process technology.

To protect against data loss and improve reliability, the controller uses both Reed-Solomon and Bose-Chadhuri-Hocquenghem hardware based error-correcting technologies.  It is compatible with flash memory from the major flash vendors, which helps make it more competitive by not being locked to a specific flash memory vendor.  The controller's performance also remains consistent regardless of the flash memory type.

While this controller looks very promising, it will not be until at least the 4th quarter this year that mass production begins.  With this controller throughput approaching the limit of SATA2 (300MB/s), it will also not be long before SSD controller improvements exceed the throughput limit of SATA2 controllers.  So far, SATA-IO has only come up with a draft specification for SATA 6Gbps as of July 2008.