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SSDs driving SATA Express and NVMe innovation

posted by janrinok on Monday March 17 2014, @08:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the faster-and-faster dept.

NezSez writes regarding an article in extremetech:

"SATA Express is SATA and PCIe over cables (preserving backwards compatibility) and NVMe is the next improvement of AHCI with much lower latencies by using the PCIe bus/lanes. Both have been developed to improve access to SSD's which have their own processors on-board and can communicate quicker than mechanical drives. The specifications look good (up to 4 times faster and can scale with improvements of PCIe) but analysts suspect it will only be adopted for small form factors.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Monday March 17 2014, @11:03AM

    by wantkitteh (3362) on Monday March 17 2014, @11:03AM (#17627)

    I was using the word compete in terms of performance and should have known better than to leave it unqualified here of all places.

    With the removal of the intermediary SATA from the mass storage data flow route, I would assume that latency would drop and throughput would rise. Given that today's SSDs can push 500MB/s over SATA3, which itself is limited to 600MB/s, I can't see that increase being a lot, although faster storage would most likely be right behind SATAe in the release pipeline. A single PCIe v4.0 lane can handle just shy of 2GB/s, so there would be an argument in favour of designing multilane SATAe for workstations and servers that need to aggregate the full throughput from multiple SSDs. As such I can't see any argument beyond legacy architecture for SATAe failing to penetrate the enterprise market where performance is preferable over GB:#LOCAL_CURRENCY.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by hamsterdan on Monday March 17 2014, @11:59AM

    by hamsterdan (2829) on Monday March 17 2014, @11:59AM (#17673)

    A faster interface will allow SSD manufacturers to parallelize them more (ie, run 32 or 64 NAND chips in something similar to a RAID-0 array, enabling even faster speeds)

    Ditch the 2.5 form factor too, I'm guessing my 120GB drive only uses maybe half or less of its casing.