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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