Buy ASUS Wi-Fi PCI Express Adapter (PCE-AC56): Everything Else - Amazon.com FREE DELIVERY possible on eligible purchases. Buy Sapphire Radeon VAPOR-X R9 280X 3 GB GDDR5 DVI-I/DVI-D/HDMI/DP TRI-X with Boost PCI-Express Graphics Card 11221-20-20G: Graphics Cards - Amazon.com FREE DELIVERY.
SSD Interface Comparison: PCI Express vs SATASSD Interface Comparison: PCI Express vs SATA(And not only one, but two reviews of the Plextor M6e!)(FREE SSD GIVEAWAY INFO AT THE END!)Introduction: Remember the old days? Back when you had to use that big fat PATA cable to connect your drives? As HDD technologies progressed; RPMs and cache size increased, controllers, and firmware matured, they finally replaced the old connection with SATA to allow more speed and features to the end user. Well, we are at that time gain! As newer and newer SSDs are hitting the marketplace, they all seem to be facing the same issue.
Video Card and Graphic Cards explained, along with prices and video connector types. SSD Interface Comparison: PCI Express vs SATA (And not only one, but two reviews of the Plextor M6e!) (FREE SSD GIVEAWAY INFO AT THE END!) Introduction: Remember.
The SATA interface itself has become a bottleneck. Newer and more advanced SSD controllers are able to allow more lanes for NAND, NAND flash I/O speeds are increasing, but are speed potentials are sadly shackled down by newest SATA 6. Gb/s standard, let alone SATA 3.
Gb/s. The host interface is having issues keeping up! How will manufactures solve this issue? PCIe is the answer!
Today we are going to go into the similarities and differences between PCIe and SATA SSDs. I will be providing information on how SSDs perform now, the potential for the future, and what it all means for you the end user. By the end of this article you should have a good understanding on how these work and what is the best for you. What is SATA? If you’ve built PCs or had to add/replace a hard drive in your computer, chances are that you have encountered this connector before. SATA is the current computer bus interface for connecting a hard drive or SSD, or optical drive to the rest of the computer.
SATA replaced the older PATA, offering several advantages over the older interface: reduced cable size and cost (seven conductors instead of 4. I/O queuing protocol. Since its introduction there have been three main revisions doubling bandwidth from the previous and allowing for extra advanced features while maintaining the same physical connector. In order for a drive to communicate with the system, the SATA controller needs to have a mode set.
Common SATA interconnect modes are IDE, AHCI, RAID. Here is what each do: IDE - Old, slower, it is simply a compatibility mode for storage devices and the system. The device will run as an IDE or PATA drive.
AHCI - AHCI stands for Advanced Host Controller Interface. It is a system memory structure for computer hardware vendors to exchange data between host system memory and attached storage devices. AHCI gives software developers and hardware designers a standard method for detecting, configuring, and programming SATA/AHCI adapters.
It makes Native Command Queuing (NCQ) along with hot- plugging or hot swapping through SATA host controllers possible. NCQ is one of the important features of AHCI for SSDs. SSDs can process requests faster than HDDs. It can process so fast that the SSD could end up waiting for work. NCQ allows the OS/controller to request up to 3. RAID - RAID stands for redundant array of independent disks, originally redundant array of inexpensive disks.
It is a means by which your PC uses multiple disks as if they were one, either to increase performance, safeguard against disk failures, or both. RAID mode has all the advantages of AHCI mode. There are four main factors of a RAID setup: striping, which spreads data across multiple drives, mirroring, which copies the data to more than one disk, space efficiency, which is how much of the total space is available to use, and fault tolerance, which is a measure of how well protected the RAID array is against disk failure. What is PCIe? Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, or PCIe, is a physical interconnect for motherboard expansion. Normally this is the connector slot you plug your graphics card, network card, sound card, or for storage purposes, a RAID card into. PCIe was designed to replace the older PCI, PCI- X, and AGP bus standards and to allow for more flexibility for expansion.
Improvements include higher maximum bandwidth, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance- scaling, more detailed error detection and reporting, and hot- plugging. The physical connector on the motherboard typically allows for up to 1. A PCIe device that is an x. PCIe x. 4 slot up to an x. PCIe 1. 0 allowed for 2. MB/s per lane, PCIe 2.
MB/s per lane and the newest PCIe 3. GB/s per lane. However, in real world throughput PCIe 2. MB/s due to its 8b/1. PCIe 3. 0 allows for 9.
MB/s due to its improved 1. With that, by multiplying lane speed by the number of lanes gives us a theoretical maximum speed for that slot. Cards are generally backward compatible and the PCIe is full- duplex (data goes both ways at one time, unlike SATA).
So far PCIe seems to be the way to go for fast access storage, but why hasn’t it taken off sooner at a larger scale? Well there is just one catch. Until recently, there hasn’t been much standardizations on how PCIe SSDs would communicated with the host system. Manufacturers had to create their own and they were more focused on performance rather than standardization and compatibility. However, now they have been working on standards for PCIe SSDs which is why newer drives are getting better by the minute. What is SATA Express, NVMe, and M.
SATA Express - SATA Express, initially standardized in the SATA 3. SATA or PCIe storage devices. The host connector is backward compatible with the standard 3. SATA data connector, while also providing multiple PCI Express lanes as a pure PCI Express connection to the storage device. The physical connector will allow up to two legacy SATA devices to be connected if a SATA Express device is not used.
The industry is moving forward with SATA Express now rather than SATA 1. Gb/s. SATA Express was born because it was concluded that SATA 1. Gb/s would require too many changes, be more costly and have higher power consumption than desirable. For example, 2 lanes of PCIe 3. SATA 6. Gb/s with only 4% increase in power. However, keep in mind as of now SATA express SSDs will normally be limited to the chipset and implementation limitations in terms of speed when compared to the potential of true PCIe SSDs.
NVM Express - NVMe or Non- Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCI) is a new and backward- compatible interface specification for solid state drives. It is like that of the SATA modes IDE, AHCI, and RAID, but specifically for PCIe SSDs.
It is to support either SATA (I believe specifically SATA Express) or PCI Express storage devices. As you know, most SSDs we use connect via SATA, but that interface was made for mechanical hard drives and lags behind due to SSD’s design being more DRAM like. AHCI has a benefit of compatibility with legacy software. NVMe is much more efficient than AHCI and cuts out lot of overhead because of it. Multiple OSes have NVMe support already built into them, for example Microsoft added native support for NVMe to Windows 8. Windows Server 2. R2 and Linux has it built into is kernel as of 2.
Now it’s up to SSD manufacturers to design supporting drives to take advantage of this for their consumer products. M. 2 - Well now that you know what PCIe, SATA, and the different interconnects are, let us go into the new M. I am mentioning the M. Plextor M6e we have for testing is simply a M.
SSD connected to a PCIe adapter. The M. 2 standard is an improved revision of the m. SATA connector design. It allows for more flexibility in the manufacturing of not only SSDs, Wi- Fi, Bluetooth, satellite navigation, near field communication (NFC), digital radio, Wireless Gigabit Alliance (Wi.
Gig), and wireless WAN (WWAN). On the consumer end, SSDs especially benefit due to the ability to have double the storage capacity than that of an equivalent m. SATA device. Furthermore, having a smaller and more flexible physical specification, together with more advanced features, the M. The form factor supports one SATA port at up to 6. Gb/s or 4 PCIe 3.
GB/s. Ok, PCIe allows for faster potential bandwidth, but why is the current SATA interface such a bottleneck? What does this all mean for the future of SSDs? Current SATA 6. Gb/s specification only allows for SSDs to reach a maximum of ~5. MB/sec. While that seems pretty fast in itself, it is still a bottleneck. SATA 2. 0 is even slower, only allowing SSDs to achieve a max bandwidth of ~2. MB/s. In SSD design there is a main controller that branches out to NAND chips via lanes. Your information is stored on the NAND chips.
Each chip has a rated speed at which it performs. Early NAND ran around 5.
MB/s per chip. The NAND interface bandwidth for current Toggle- Mode Toshiba NAND and OFNI NAND is up to 4. MB/s. Now, the controller basically uses the NAND chips as one would have multiple drives in a RAID 0 array. More chips connected to it via the lanes allows for more data speed. With this in mind, current NAND chips in consumer SSDs usually run around 2. MB/s. That coupled with usually 4- 8 chips on a typical SSD, there is a potential for up to 1.
Gb/s transfer speeds. You can see how easily SATA 6. Gb/s has become a bottleneck now can’t you?
Now, another issue with the SATA interface is that it has a lot more overhead than that of PCIe 3. PCIe 2. 0 suffers from the same 8b/1.
SATA 3. 0, but still allows for around 2. PCIe 3. 0 however, has been revised to use 1. PCIe technology enables interface speeds of up to 1. GB/s per client lane (PCIe 3.
SATA technology speeds of up to 0. GB/s (SATA 3. 0).
And with that, more lanes from SATA require more SATA devices while in PCIe bandwidth can be scaled to up to 1. With PCIe, the bandwidth throughput possibilities are much higher at up to 1. GB/s x. 16 lanes from a single device to allow for 1. GB/s transfer speeds via PCIe 3. And then you can even RAID 0 multiple PCIe storage devices for even faster speeds, chipset permitting of course.
It allows for a direct connection to the CPU. Traditionally, the SATA controller is connected to a chipset which is then connected to the CPU. The PCIe links travel directly to the CPU.