LSI shook up flash drives Wednesday with word it was buying SandForce. The $322 million cash deal gives it access to SandForce’s well-known, very fast controllers for solid-state drives. The acquirer, normally limited to PCI Express cards, now said would have a stake in ultrabooks.
It would also lead to more unique PCIe cards than what LSI had managed in the past. SandForce is already being used in some of LSI’s hardware, but the buyout could see more optimizations.
The two companies anticipate the deal being closed in early 2012, when SandForce will form a core part of a new Flash Components​ team headed up by SandForce’s current CEO, Mike Raam.
SandForce has been popular among gamers and performance users for its high speeds, with many going out of their way to get SSDs that use SandForce controllers. Its best controllers can pump an SSD to over 500MB per second in reads and writes, faster than most mainstream SSDs.
