The SATA II interface that the Barefoot controller uses is only capable of 300MB/s. With protocol overhead factored in, the real world performance of SSDs is already limited when reading from cache, leading many SSD manufacturers to create PCIe-based solutions.
New types of flash like the DDR MLC NAND recently announced by Samsung will allow much faster read and write speeds with the next generation of SSDs. Motherboards supporting a 6Gbps SATA interface are already available.
Indilinx Jet Stream 6Gbps SATA SSD controller delayed
Posted on Friday, December 04 2009 @ 22:53 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
DailyTech heard Indilinx's successor to the popular Barefoot controller has been delayed to Q1 2010. This new SSD controller is codenamed "Jet Stream" and has been under development for over a year. Jet Stream will support SATA 6Gbps and DDR NAND flash memory, it is reportedly being design for a 65nm process, and can be used for SSDs up to 1TB.