Marvell’s 3rd Generation 88SS9187 SSD Controller

Today Marvell is announcing its third generation SSD controller with the 88SS9187. Its predecessor, the 88SS9174 was used in many drives including Crucial's m4 and Intel's SSD 510. The 9187[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK] appears to be mostly a feature update, adding support for the following:

- SATA 3.1

- On-chip RAID (allowing for failure of defective NAND block, plane, die or device)

- DDR3 memory interface (up to 1GB external DRAM supported)

- ~500MB/s sequential write speed

- 6Gbps SATA limited sequential read speed

- "best-in-class" random read/write speed

Details are scarce but it sounds like the 9187 is simply a higher performance (potentially lower power?) version of its predecessor. Marvell is expecting the 9187 to be used by manufacturers in Ultrabooks among other designs this year. Marvell's SSD controllers have always been priced competitively, but they've often required a lot of custom firmware work to get the best performance/compatibility/reliability out of them. I see no indication that Marvell's business model has changed, so you can expect to see the 9187 used similarly to its predecessor.