… With New Indilinx Everest 2 SSD Controller

OCZ Technology Group, Inc. introduced Indilinx Everest 2, its next-generation SSD platform that delivers a performance of 120,000 random IOPS for SATA-based drives.

In addition, the Everest 2 features theadvanced flash management capabilities which can extend NAND flash life and enhance SSD reliability. This innovative controller platform debuts in OCZ’s new Vertex 4 SSD product line.

The Indilinx Everest 2 family of SSD processors establishes delivers performance and reliability to next-generation SSDs. Combining a 400MHz dual-core CPU, 6Gbps SATA Revision 3.0 interface, support for advanced NAND flash memory technology, and exceeds the needs of the demanding SSD environments.

Everest 2 features an optimized system architecture, showcasing the potential of integration between hardware and firmware. By combining a parallel and pipelined hardware design with efficient data management algorithms, it achieves fast speed under any workload, regardless of data type and I/O pattern. This results in near-zero data access latency and transactional performance of any SATA processor available today. Everest 2-powered SSDs enable instantaneous system booting and application loading to SSD responsiveness in the most demanding and compute-intensive applications.

Everest 2 also unveils Ndurance 2.0, a suite of NAND flash management technology developed for SATA SSDs. Designed exclusively for Indilinx SSD processors, it overcomes critical NAND flash memory shortcomings to ensure that SSDs with consumer-grade NAND flash can be reliably used in both enterprise and client computing environments over a lifetime beyond the manufacturer-rated endurance limits.

"Our Indilinx Everest 2 platform with Ndurance 2.0 is truly in a class by itself. It convincingly outperforms all competing solutions while providing unparalleled reliability and exceptional value through its life-extending NAND flash management capabilities," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. "This revolutionary architecture will be integral in our own storage developments going forward, and offers storage solution manufacturers with unprecedented performance, endurance and cost flexibility to optimize their designs."

The Indilinx Everest 2 SSD controller platform
includes capabilities such as:

Performance Optimization
The architecture features sequential bandwidth of up to 535 MB/s, maximum random I/O performance of up to 120,000 IOPS, 4K random read performance of up to 95,000 IOPS, and random write performance of up to 85,000 IOPS. In comparison to OCZ’s previous Everest SSD controller generation, the transactional performance is doubled under typical use case scenarios such as managing and creating commonplace data such as MP3s, JPEGs, videos and digital camera RAW files.

In addition to this transactional performance, it reduces latency to 0.043ms for read operations and 0.026ms for write operations, yielding an improvement of approximately 80 percent over the previous Everest SSD controller generation. This latency reduction accelerates access to data, and hence, application system performance.

Extending NAND Flash Life
Extending the life of NAND flash memory for MLC-based SSD requires an intelligent controller that can analyze and dynamically adapt to increasing NAND vulnerabilities as the flash cells wear or process geometries get smaller. The Everest 2 controller, featuring Indilinx Ndurance 2.0 technology, is designed to extend NAND flash memory life while providing enterprise-class endurance even when commodity-grade NAND flash is used.

Ndurance 2.0 technology suite
includes the following capabilities:

• Multi-Level ECC: The multi-level BCH ECC engine with progressive error correction adapts to the specific error characteristics of different NAND devices. The programmable ECC engine achieves an effective correction power of up to 128 bits per 1KB of data while significantly reducing the uncorrectable bit error rate (UBER).
• Adaptive Program and Read Algorithms: Proprietary and vendor-specific program and read algorithms are applied, ranging from internal voltage shifting to sophisticated signal processing techniques that minimize NAND flash deterioration, reduce disturbances that affect adjacent flash cells, and improve data recovery.
• Redundant NAND Array (RNA) Technology: This option safeguards against catastrophic NAND flash failures and uncorrectable data errors by generating parity data information and striping it across multiple NAND flash cells. RNA provides RAID-like protection that enables data to be divided and replicated amongst multiple NAND flash devices within an OCZ SSD.
• Reduced Write Amplification without Compression: Lower write amplification is achieved by concatenating multiple write requests from the host while minimizing wasteful copy back operations of unaffected data sectors. This approach virtually eliminates excessive programming and read operations while preserving program/erase cycles without the need for performance-degrading data compression.

Feature Set Includes

• Broad NAND flash support, including 1xnm and TLC
• Up to 8 NAND flash channels with up to 16-way interleaving per channel
• Up to 535 MB/s transfer rates when using synchronous flash
• HyperQueueing and Native Command Queuing (NCQ), with a queue depth up to 32 commands, and algorithms to optimize the order in which read and write operations are executed
• Up to 8Gb of 800MHz DDR2/DDR3 DRAM cache support
• Multi-Level ECC with 128-bit correction capability per 1KB of data
• RNA Redundant NAND Array to protect against catastrophic NAND flash failure
• End-to-end data path protection performs data integrity checks at every juncture where data is transmitted, received, processed and stored to ensure that corrupted data will be detected and not propagated
• Power fail protection and optional Supercap support prevents data loss in the event of a power failure
• Auto encryption and AES-256 encryption to protect and secure data
• Additional flash management techniques such as TRIM, background garbage collection, dynamic and static wear-leveling and advanced flash defect management

The Everest 2 SSD controller platform will be implemented in future OCZ storage solutions with the first being the OCZ Vertex 4 SSD available through OCZ’s global channel in a range of capacities.