So sequential reads are throttled too. Down to about 1/3, but random reads are unaffected. Interesting. I have to assume that it is unintentional. There's obviously no reason to throttle reads. So for some reason they weren't able to throttle writes without throttling reads. I wonder if that might give some clue to how their throttle algorithm works.

Am I the only one who is chafing at the bit, dying to get a look at the firmware code? I wonder where it is stored. Probably in some flash inside of the Sandforce chip itself and not in a separate EEPROM or on the "reserved" portion of the OEM supplied flash memory. According to OCZ the firmware data is not only readable, but writable from software, presumably PC software. I believe a customized version of mptools was mentioned. So the data must be addressable/retrievable/dumpable by the computer somehow.