Indilinx
More info
- Released
- 2006–2011
- Type
- Controller maker (fabless)
- Successor
- Acquired by OCZ
The Korean controller maker whose Barefoot chip made the early consumer SSDs fast enough to care about.
Indilinx was a fabless Korean outfit that did one thing that mattered: the Barefoot controller (2009). Before it, the market was split between expensive Intel drives at one end and sluggish JMicron chips at the other. Barefoot sat in the middle — fast enough, cheap enough — and ended up in a whole generation of drives from OCZ, Crucial, G.Skill and Super Talent.
The controller is an SSD's brain: it handles wear leveling, address translation and error correction. Indilinx proved a small player could build a competitive one. OCZ bought the company in 2011 to own its own silicon, just before SandForce took over the performance crown.