Introduction

Most of you don't know Daniel Kim, but if you purchased an SSD in 2009 or 2010, the chances are he designed the controller inside it. Back then, two SSD controllers dominated the consumer market. Intel held the performance crown with the 10-channel X25-M and Indilinx's Barefoot dominated the low-price segment. The Indilinx Barefoot was all over the market, much like SandForce is today. If SandForce had a blueprint going into the consumer market they swiped it from Indilinx because the Barefoot was the first controller to gain mass acceptance with drive manufacturers.

As most of you know, OCZ Technology scooped up Indilinx in March of 2011 for roughly 32 million dollars in common stock. In the package was around 20 patents and patent applications according to Wikipedia, but Daniel Kim, pretty much the father of Barefoot, didn't make the transition. Daniel had other plans and today we're going to see the first new product to come from his new company, Novachips.

Just days before we took to the sky for Computex 2012, Biwin announced a new enterprise SSD under the name NuvoDrive NX. The press release for the NuvoDrive NX was also the first time we'd heard Novachips was ready to unveil their first SSD controller.

Officially dubbed NVS3600A, a rather unmemorable part number, the code name for this 10-channel controller is Bugatti. I doubt anyone would officially tell us Bugatti has any relation to the Italian car maker responsible for such marvels as the EB110, one of my favorites of all time and the current supercar masterpiece Veyron 16.4. That's OK though, we get it even without an official statement. Obviously Novachips wants us to associate the NVS3600A with high speed.

Today we take a world exclusive look at an engineering sample Biwin NuvoDrive NX. This drive is based on beta hardware and beta firmware. The performance we show today will not be the same as the final product. The test does allow us to get a good feel for the drive. We also identified a couple of issues that we reported back to Biwin which will allow them to put out a better product when it comes time to review the NuvoDrive NX.