SandForce’s strength is the ability to compress data before it gets into the flash memory. This peculiarity helps solve several problems at once: first of all, increase the performance and prolong the drive’s resource. However, it only works well until the data stored on the drive are compressible. Otherwise, the advantages of SandForce controllers become not so obvious anymore.
However, SSDs based on Marvell 88SS9174 do not depend on the type of data saved onto the drive. They demonstrate constant stable performance with compressible files as well as with incompressible photographs, videos and audio content. Moreover, Marvell 88SS9174 is capable of fighting the SSD performance degradation very effectively, so that it improves almost to its “fresh†level not only after the TRIM command, but even without it by simply performing idle garbage collection.
Therefore, solid state drives with a Marvell controller inside are a much better fit for RAID arrays or systems that do not support TRIM. As for all other cases, the choice between Marvell or SandForce based SSD should depend on the preferred usage model. SandForce devices will work faster in everyday tasks dealing with well-compressible data, while Marvell devices will deliver higher performance with incompressible data and in case of dominating random requests at a deep queue, which is more typical of servers.
