Controller Timeline

What controllers could drive

Each row is a controller with a public brief, press release or review, dated by that document. Host is the link to the PC: the bus, its speed, the PCIe lanes and the command protocol, where the source states them. A Note tag marks an unusual design, such as AHCI over PCIe, a drive that needs special boot support, SATA Express, a bridge or RAID card, a DRAM-less controller, or SAS. The notes are listed below the table. The host bus chips above the chart filter this table too.

Download the controllers and their sources: CSV or JSON. Each row is one sourced value with the source it was read from, and the D and T marks as columns.

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Notes on unusual controllers

1. Silicon Motion SM2259XT2. DRAM-less, with only two NAND channels, for low-cost SATA drives. Silicon Motion 2022 product page
2. Silicon Motion SM2258XT. DRAM-less: a single-chip SATA controller with no DRAM cache, to cut cost. Silicon Motion 2019 product page
3. Silicon Motion SM2259 / SM2259XT. The SM2259XT is the DRAM-less version of this SATA controller. Silicon Motion 2019 product page
4. Phison PS3111-S11. A two-channel controller that usually runs without DRAM. Both engineering samples TweakTown tested were DRAM-less. TweakTown 2016 review
5. SandForce (Seagate/LSI) SF2400 (Cloud Flash Controller). DRAM-less: a single chip with no external DRAM. Seagate Technology 2014 product page
6. SandForce (Seagate/LSI) SF3700 (SF3719/29/39/59). One chip that can be built as either a PCIe or a SATA drive. Seagate called it the first controller to support native PCIe Gen2 and SATA 6Gb/s in a single design, and over PCIe it speaks AHCI or NVMe. Seagate Technology 2014 product page
7. JMicron JMF810. JMicron described it as a PCIe Gen2 two-lane and SATA 6Gb/s combo chip, or a SATA Express port, so one design could serve SATA Express systems. JMicron Technology 2014 release
8. SandForce (LSI) SF-2200 / SF-2100 (SF-2281 family). DRAM-less: SandForce built it as a single chip with no external DRAM. Seagate Technology 2014 product page
9. Marvell 88SS9174. Crucial’s RealSSD C300, which runs on this controller, was announced in 12/2009 as the first SSD with native SATA 6Gb/s. Micron 2009 release
10. JMicron JMF612. Takes an external DDR or DDR2 cache of up to 256MB, which bit-tech said was there to stop the stuttering of JMicron's earlier 602 controller. bit-tech 2009 review
11. SandForce SF-1000 family. Speaks only SATA. SandForce said SAS drives could be built by putting a third-party SAS-to-SATA bridge chip in front of it. SandForce 2009 release
12. JMicron JMF602. Tom's Hardware said it had only 16KB of onboard cache and would choke under heavy writes, holding up the PC while it caught up. That stutter is why many early drives built on it were dropped. Tom's Hardware 2009 review
13. Silicon Motion SM2524XT. DRAM-less: it uses the host memory buffer (HMB) in place of its own DRAM, with four NAND channels. Silicon Motion 2026 product page
14. Microchip (Microsemi/PMC Flashtec) Flashtec NVMe 5016. In October 2026 Microchip announced an enhanced 5016 that adds support for the CNSA 2.0 algorithm suite, aimed at post-quantum security requirements. Microchip Technology 2026 release
15. Silicon Motion SM2268XT. DRAM-less, using the NVMe Host Memory Buffer. Silicon Motion 2023 release
16. Phison PS5015-E15T. DRAM-less: it uses the NVMe Host Memory Buffer, a small slice of the PC’s own memory, in place of a DRAM chip. In my review it read as a PCIe 3.0 version of the E19T that replaced the E13T. Tom's Hardware 2022 review
17. Maxio MAP1202. DRAM-less: Maxio lists it among its controllers that run with no external DRAM. Maxio 2021 product page
18. Maxio MAP1602. DRAM-less: Maxio lists it among its controllers that run with no external DRAM. Maxio 2021 product page
19. Silicon Motion SM2267 / SM2267XT. The SM2267XT is the DRAM-less version and uses the NVMe Host Memory Buffer instead. Silicon Motion 2020 product page
20. Silicon Motion SM2263EN / SM2263XT. The SM2263XT is the DRAM-less version, built for drives that use the NVMe Host Memory Buffer. Silicon Motion 2019 product page
21. Phison PS5013-E13T. DRAM-less. The BGA version runs on two PCIe 3.0 lanes instead of four. Tom's Hardware 2019 review
22. Phison PS5019-E19T. DRAM-less: it uses the NVMe Host Memory Buffer, a small slice of the PC’s own memory, in place of a DRAM chip. Tom's Hardware 2019 review
23. Phison PS5008-E8 / E8T. The E8T is the DRAM-less version: it keeps its address map in the PC’s memory through the NVMe Host Memory Buffer. Both use a two-lane PCIe 3.0 link, which Tom’s Hardware said only Phison was doing. Tom's Hardware 2017 review
24. Marvell 88NV1160. DRAM-less, built for small BGA SSDs. It uses the NVMe Host Memory Buffer to keep working data in a little of the PC’s own memory. Marvell 2016 release
25. Samsung SM951 controller. The same drive came in two versions: AHCI from 1/2015 and NVMe from 4/2015. Samsung rated the NVMe one at 300,000 random read IOPS against 130,000 for AHCI. Samsung 2015 release
26. Marvell 88SS1083. Marvell called it the first controller fully compliant with SATA Express, the cabled two-lane PCIe link meant to replace SATA 6Gb/s. A SATA Express port also takes ordinary SATA drives. Marvell 2014 release
27. Marvell 88SS9183. A native PCIe controller that still uses AHCI, so it needs no special driver. Most PCIe SSDs before it were SATA controllers behind a RAID or host bus chip. Tom's Hardware 2014 review
28. Samsung UAX (XP941). AHCI over PCIe, not NVMe, and booting was the catch. TweakTown found it worked only as a secondary drive on most PCs, and ASRock’s Z97 Extreme6 was the one enthusiast board that could boot from it. TweakTown 2014 review
29. OCZ RevoDrive card (two SandForce SF-1200). Not one controller but a stack: a Pericom bridge turns the card’s four-lane PCIe 1.1 link into PCI-X for a Silicon Image SiI3124 SATA controller, which joins two SandForce SF-1200 controllers in the equivalent of RAID 0. Tom's Hardware 2011 review
30. PMC PM8304 SFM-12G. A native SAS flash controller, not a SATA controller behind a bridge. Its two 12Gb/s ports run as one wide link or as two paths for dual-port enterprise drives. PMC-Sierra 2012 product page
31. Silicon Motion SM2320. Talks USB directly, so a portable SSD built on it needs no separate USB bridge chip in front of an SSD controller. Silicon Motion 2021 release