Specifications, Pricing and Availability

Biwin already published the PRELIMINARY specifications. Since the performance data was taken from early hardware and early firmware, we expect some of these values to change. When Indilinx released the Barefoot, the closest relative to Bugatti, the performance was good, but the final release firmware was much faster. This is very common with SSDs and one that we welcome because free performance via a simple firmware flash is a nice feature.

The official, PRELIMINARY performance for sequential reads is 500MB/s and 520MB/s for the sequential writes. The random 4K write performance is right around 80K IOPS. To date very few SSDs have been able to match the performance from the SandForce controllers, but the Bugatti is a contender. Unlike the Team SandForce MLC products, Bugatti does not take a hit when working with incompressible data.

When we first heard about the Bugatti we were interested in finding out more right off the bat. It's been quite a while since we'd seen a 10-channel controller. After thinking about it a bit we understood why Novachips would go this route. The controller was engineered to outperform an Intel 10-channel SATA III drive, or at least compete with one. The old Indilinx hardware team missed a generation, but so did Intel. In their absence SandForce and Marvell picked up the slack. It's easy to see that Novachips saw the superior 10-channel design as a step in the right direction and a way to compete with other controller makers.

At this time we can't say much about the price or availability except Biwin plans to hit current SandForce level pricing. As for when the NuvoDrive NX will hit the market, your guess is as good as mine.