SandForce, one of the leading makers of controller chips for solid-state drives (SSD) has announced a new generation of controllers that offer double the performance of legacy models. It also sports enhanced security capabilities that are probably best described as 'overkill.' As reported by Computerworld, 256-bit AES encryption is performed on incoming data, which is encrypted a second time using 128-bit encryption as it is written to the NAND flash memory, according to senior director of product marketing, Kent Smith.

The SF-2200 family supports the newer 6Gbps SATA interface, while the SF-2100 family works with SATA 2.0 drives. The former sports a maximum read and write performance of 500MBps, while the latter can do 240MBps. 

While it is quite common to find good SSDs today that can perform in excess of 200MBps, faster speeds are usually only achieved on enterprise-centric SLC-based SSDs or SSDs in RAID configurations. As such, the new controller family from SandForce is certainly leading the way to faster commodity SSDs. Already, SSD maker OCZ has announced a new Vertex 3 family of SSD utilizing the SF-2200, and which the company claims delivers double the performance of the previous generation of drives.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Computerworld
- check out this article at PC Mag

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