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LSI acquires SandForce for $370 million, looks to step up its SSD game
SandForce has been behind many an SSD in its day, but it looks like it's finally about to settle down, and get hitched. Yesterday, LSI announced plans to acquire the flash storage company, as part of a $370 million agreement. The deal brings SandForce's processors and energy efficient DuraClass technology under LSI's roof, giving the semiconductor designer some new flash firepower and an extra boost into a burgeoning market. Tangible results, of course, remain to be seen, though it's certainly not the first time these two have danced. SandForce, after all, provided the motor for LSI's WarpDrive lineup, and will presumably do much more, once the deal goes through. Pending regulatory approval, the acquisition should be finalized by the first quarter of 2012. Full PR after the break.
LSI's WarpDrive SSD is a steal at $11,500
We want one of these so bad. The LSI WarpDrive SLP-300 packs 300GB of solid state storage onto a PCI Express card and promises up to 240,000 sustained IOPS (Input / Output Operations Per Second), with 1,400MBps sustained throughput -- about double the performance of OCZ's substantially cheaper RevoDrive X2. According to LSI, you would need over 400 regular hard drives in 36U of rack space and 300 times the power to match the WarpDrive for sheer IOPS. Sure, LSI recommends all sorts of fancy server applications to put this $11,500 card to good use, but we've been noticing some serious browser launch lag time lately... and we're worth it.
