VR-Zone

VLI's NAND Flash controller has been long time coming and the company has finally announced the VL751 today. It's an affordable single-chip NAND Flash controller for USB 3.0 Flash drives. Not only should it allow for more affordable USB 3.0 Flash drives, but we should also see improved performance compared to many solutions currently in the market.

Although VLI scrapped its initial VL750 NAND Flash controller project due to various reasons (although it's still listed on their website), the extra time has allowed the company to tweak the overall design and add some new features to the VL751. The most important additions according to the press release include "improved parallelization and higher efficiency through integrated pre-read and pre-write buffers" both of which should improve the overall performance. Other additions consist of "better support for popular flash memories, and a pipelined ECC engine".

Performance wise VLI claims transfer speeds of 120MB/s or potentially more depending on the NAND Flash used, as the VL751 sports a quad channel memory controller with interleaving support. In USB 2.0 mode speeds are a bit more modest at up to 35MB/s, but that would still be close to about as fast as the USB 2.0 spec goes. The VL751 supports standard bulk-only transport (BOT) as well as UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) of which the latter should offer a performance boost in certain circumstances. We're hoping to get a fully functional USB Flash drive based on the VL751 from VLI for a preview in the near future, so check back with us for that in a few weeks.

Source: VLI