OCZ Vertex to use Indilinx SSD controller

DailyTech heard OCZ will adopt the Barefoot SSD controller from Indilinx for its Vertex series of solid state disks. The drives are expected to be available by the end of February, and will be cheaper than the prices originally announced in December. The OCZ Vertex 120GB and 250GB SSDs will receive 64MB of cache, while the 30GB and 60GB models will have 32MB of cache.

The first Barefoot controller we saw in August last year was built on 90nm process technology, with a very fast read speed of 230MB/s and support of up to 512GB of MLC NAND flash using at least four channels. Indilinx classifies it as a second generation SSD controller, meaning it has maximum read speeds over 200MB/s and maximum write speeds over 150MB/s, using a native SATA controller.

The Barefoot controller is notable for using up to 64MB for data buffering, surpassing traditional hard disk drives. It also features ECC capability of more than 12 bits per sector to ensure reliability, with hardware implementations of both Reed-Solomon and BCH (Bose Chadhuri Hocquenghem) Error Correcting Code.

Indilinx is currently focusing on its third generation controller, codenamed "Jet Stream". It will feature ONFI 2.0 support and a SATA 6Gb/s interface, providing throughput of up to 600MB/s, with a target release date in the third quarter of 2009. Both Intel and AMD are working on new chipsets that will support 6GB/s.