Friday, 18 September 2015

SSDs level up

Forget SATA for SSDs – there’s a new breed of solid-state storage that blasts through old bottlenecks thanks to PCIe.

As computer hardware becomes more powerful, access to data has become a problematic bottleneck that solid-state drives (SSDs) have helped open up. SSDs have now hit something of a speed limit themselves, however, because most of the PC’s existing storage interfaces were originally designed for older mechanical hard drives and are already too slow for SSDs. The majority of mainstream drives can already max out the SATA 6Gbps interface, and even the newer upgraded SATA Express is too slow for some. PCI-Express (PCIe) is the answer, with an x16 slot able to provide up to 32GB/s of bandwidth and thus giving plenty of scope for performance growth. It’s only been recently that fast PCIe SSDs have been available to general consumers, but even these have faced issues with cost and performance. In the last year or so, the M.2 interface has helped small form-factor SSDs drop in price and has become a popular option for both desktops and laptops. M.2 drives can use the SATA interface, but when doing so are limited in bandwidth like any SATA SSD. On compatible motherboards, however, M.2 can also plug into the PCIe interface directly, letting SSDs run to their full speed potential without any bandwidth bottlenecking. For desktops without an M.2 socket these drives can be plugged into a PCIe slot adaptor board, and there’s also a smattering of dedicated PCIe card-based SSDs on the market. Even within PCIe SSDs, there are a variety of speeds available, depending on which controllers, NAND and PCIe interface is used. Of course, being new, these nextgen SSDs have a tendency to be more expensive than their more common SATA brethren – usually at least double the cost per gigabyte. But then, with most PCIe SSDs more than doubling the performance of their SATA counterparts, they’re arguably also worth the higher prices.

LABS TEST RESULTS

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