What we have here are the official specs of the second-generation SandForce SSDs, the SF-2000 series. Drives will be sampling to enterprise customers in the coming weeks, but we probably won’t see shipping hardware until Quarter 1 of 2011 if everything goes according to plan. And the specs are really impressive to say the least.

SandForce’s controller gets around the inherent problems with writing to NAND by simply writing less. Using real time compression and data deduplication algorithms, the SF controllers store a representation of your data and not the actual data itself. The reduced data stored on the drive is also encrypted and stored redundantly across the NAND to guarantee against dataloss from page level or block level failures. Both of these features are made possible by the fact that there’s simply less data to manage.

Another thing about SandForce’s write-less policy is there’s no need for an external DRAM to handle large mapping tables. It reduces the total BOM cost of the SSD and allows SandForce to charge a premium for its controllers.

The new SF-2000 controllers support both ONFI 2 and toggle interfaces. Unlike legacy NAND chips which writes in a very straight forward manner, both ONFI 2 and Toggle NAND add another bit to the NAND interface, which is the DQS signal. The Write Enable signal is still present but it’s now only used for latching commands and addresses, DQS is used for data transfers. Instead of only transferring data when the DQS signal is high ONFI2 and Toggle NAND support transferring data on both the rising and falling edges of the DQS signal, which increases the data transfer from 40MB/s to 166MB/s. A very tremendous improvement as you can see.

Read more about the new SandForce SF-2000 NAND over at Anand.