SandForce’s big score: $25M investment round and quad-controller PCIe x4 SSD from OCZ

This is SandForce’s week. First the SSD controller-chip vendor announced $25M worth of D-round investment funding to help it design better, faster controllers. Michael Raam, president and CEO of SandForce, said “This new funding will help us bring our next-generation products to market, expand our customer and partner support infrastructure, and accelerate our core technology development that will extend our market leadership.” Sounds like this may be a response to the joint announcement of cooperation on SSD controller development between Samsung and Seagate made late last month.

Second, PC add-on specialist OCZ introduced the RevoDrive X2 SSD with four SandForce processors and a PCIe x4 interface enabling up to nearly 1 Terabyte of NAND Flash storage capacity, more than 730 Mbytes/sec sequential read and/or write performance, and more than 120,000 random write IOPS (4KB block transfer size). This drive’s performance further emphasizes the advantages of employing a PCIe interface for SSDs. The product was introduced and demonstrated at this week's Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco.

A good week by anyone’s measure.