OCZ Technology is fast becoming a dominant force in the solid-state drive market. Over the past year or so the company has released nearly a dozen different series, targeting home and enterprise users at competitive price points, and usually receiving high marks on reviews. Now, showing its commitment to be at the forefront of SSD technology, OCZ is teasing a new generation of drives based on controllers from startup SandForce.
The drives will reportedly cover the mainstream, enthusiast and enterprise markets, with multi and single-level cell NAND flash memory options, 3Gbps Serial ATA and 6Gbps Serial Attached SCSI interfaces, and capacities ranging from 50GB to 400GB. All models will use SandForce's SF-1200 or SF-1500 SSD processors.
Although there's no actual mention of performance figures on OCZ's press release, a quick look over at SandForce's SF-1000 family product page reveals both controllers support up to 260MB/s sequential read and write speeds. The SF-1200 is designed to utilize MLC NAND flash in order to lower costs, while the SF-1500 is targeted at high-end enterprise and workstation applications and can also handle SLC-based memory.
OCZ is apparently planning to partner with SandForce for the long term, though it remains to be seen what this move will mean for their current partnership with Indilinx, makers of the well-regarded Barefoot controller. For now, the company is only saying they plan to make some announcements in the next few weeks and show some of those new drives at CES 2010.