Chinese company enables SSDs with densities up to 5 TB - but slow

The Chinese company Sage Micro electronics today announced their SG68x SSD controllers which allows SSDs with a capacity of up to 5 TB. Currently most SSD controllers support capacities of up to 1TB.

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According to Sage the SG86x controllers are built on a multi-core processor that devotes a single concise RISC CPU core to SATA bus management, plus additional cores to handle two memory card channel interfaces each. This enables clear firmware partitioning between the SATA interface and memory card interface, simplifying software upgrades, testing and verification.

The Sage S68X family of SSD controllers includes three devices: the S681 supports 10 memory channels, the S682 supports 5 memory channels, and the S685 support 4 memory channels. All three devices are currently in mass production.

The Sage S681 device, employs a SATA II interface to drive 10 channels of SD, MMC or eMMC flash memory cards, with each channel supporting up to 512GB of flash memory. Sage uses a RAID 0 array which has the disadvantage of possible data loss when one of the channels fails.

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Sage claims its controller chip is already used in a 2.5TB SSD but according to the company the storage capacity will be doubled to 5TB. The performance of Sage SG86x powered drives is limited by the SATA-300 interface, Sage specificities sequential read and write speeds of 260 and 225 MB/s respectively. The company hasn't specified any IOPS.

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