"In considering both the LSI SandForce and Marvell controller architecture, the LSI has gained a great deal of success with SSD manufacturers because of its easily adopted firmware model that, by many accounts, makes integration much easier for OEMs. Marvell firmware, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as robust as they ship a ‘vanilla’ firmware that has core functionality only which requires more tweaking and adjustment for the manufacturer, and a dedicated firmware team to handle the work.
While this may be a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to ease-of-deployment for manufacturers, it does afford much more control of the performance characteristics of the end product. Hence, we see a definite advantage of the Marvell controller, especially with manufacturers that have the ‘in-house’ engineering team to fine tune this product."
