Marvell releases new SSD controller - 88SS9187

[peja81]

Marvell sells now SSD units of its own, or retail products at all, but it does make a lot of logic and circuits for other manufacturers to license. It has now released a new SATA controller, which it not surprisingly, hopes to sell on the mobile market.

The new SATA controller, Marvell 88SS9187, will be one of the first to support the new SATA 3.1 standard. SATA 3.1 is an extension of SATA 3.0, or SATA 6.0 Gbps, and will bring a whole lot of improvements. Among others we find better energy management (Required Link Power Management) for lower energy consumption, and Queued Trim Command. The latter enables the controller to execute the Trim command without affecting the normal operation of the SSD. In SATA 3.1 there is also official support for the relatively new mSATA standard that is already used by quite a lot of notebooks and Ultrabooks.

Marvell's business model is one of a kind among SSD units. It sells the controller separately and allows the buyer to modify the firmware for best possible performance, stability, optimized garbage control, energy saving and so forth. This has worked well so far, where companies like Crucial, Corsair and even Intel has used its 88SS9174 controller.

Marvell's new controller also makes use of cache and supports up to 1 GB DDR3. The remaining details are scarce. Marvell says performance will be better and energy consumption lower. Marvell says it has already signed partners for the new controller and more will follow. We will keep an eye out for this one and return with more information when available.

https://www.nordichardware.com/news/86-storage/45503-marvell-releases-new-ssd-controllerk-88ss9187.html