Fresh and fabless storage startup SandForce is beginning to talk about its SF-1000 SSD controller which promises read/write parity of 250MB/s with 4k blocks. Anyone who’s savvy to SSD performance figures is immediately interested in what we’re about to write.

Run by former NVIDIA employees and backed by funding from at least two top-tier storage firms, the company already boasts an impressive patent portfolio that includes methods to drastically change SSD write performance. Chief amongst the list is a hardware compression/decompression mechanism which primarily permits for certain scenarios where writes can be performed without the typical (and slow) read-modify-write sequence.

The controller is coupled with a hardware compression/decompression engine. Compressed data is stored in a particular, primary region of the data storage device with any overflow data in a mapped overflow region. When read the decompressed data is stored in the host server’s DRAM with the DRAM location stored in a table along with the storage device address, the pair constituting a pointer linking the DRAM address to the storage device address.

This mechanism appears to allow the SSD to immediately write data if a write request is made to any data currently organized in DRAM. This is a revolutionary mechanism for SSD writes which have always lagged behind read performance.

The company’s second important patent covers drive firmware which it has dubbed DuraClass. The new firmware is claimed to extend the reliability of MLC NAND cells by up to 100 times over competing controllers, and promises a 250 fold improvement in disk operations per watt. SandForce says these changes should allow today’s commodity MLC drives to operate for over five years with no usage restrictions.

If you’ve made it this far, you already understand that these claims are lightyears ahead of today’s SSDs both in terms of speed and efficiency. Sometimes it’s hard to believe claims like this, but SandForce has even recruited IBM’s VP of System Design for the Systems and Technology Group Mike Densen in their PR:

“The SF-1000 SSD Processor Family promises to address key NAND flash issues allowing MLC flash technologies to be reliably used in broad-based, mission-critical storage environments. These innovations can be truly disruptive and will accelerate the adoption of Solid State technologies across the data center.”

As The Register astutely illustrates, Densen is heavily involved in IBM’s own SSD research which included the 1,000,000 IOPS project called Project Quicksilver.

Perhaps best of all, SandForce says that products based on their new designs will begin shipping in the second calendar quarter of 2009.