JMicron announces the JMF612 SSD controller

JMicron tries to shake away the bad image of it's JMF602 chips.

The new chip is only SATA-II compliant but targets to fix the major issue that these controllers have, the random write performance, which usually causes the OS to stall for one or two seconds while in heavy loads.
The new chips have support for up to 256MB of cache, which will be enough to solve most of the problems associated with these drives. The previous JMF602 iterations only had a small amount of cache inside the chip itself, there was no support for the external cache.

There's also support for Native Command Queueing(NCQ) and an USB port for firmware upgrades, like the current JMF602 based drives. SATA-III versions are expected in mid-2010.

I eagerly await drives based on these chips, since they are expected to be cheaper than Indilinx based drives, like the OCZ Vertex, and should perform well enough for most people. The current JMF602B based drives are already very fast but the random write performance kills what would be a terrific experience.
I have an OCZ Solid 30GB with me that boots very fast but has these issues while performing writes in the background - even the mouse stalls for more than one second sometimes, let alone the rest of the computer. Installing updates for your OS of choice are also not up to par with current HDDs, due to this issue.

JMicron announces the JMF612 SSD controller @ Dailytech