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OCZ IBIS Introduces High Speed Data Link SSDs
Vigile writes "New solid state drives are released all the time, and the performance improvements on them have started to stagnate as the limits of the SATA 3.0 Gb/s are reached. SATA 6G drives are still coming out and some newer PCI Express based drives are also available for those users with a higher budget. OCZ is taking it another step with a new storage interface called High Speed Data Link (HSDL) that extends the PCI Express bus via mini-SAS cables and removes the bottleneck of SATA-based RAID controllers thus increasing theoretical performance and allowing the use of command queueing — vital to high IO's in a RAID configuration. PC Perspective has a full performance review that details the speed and IO improvements and while initial versions will be available at up to 960 GB (and a $2800 price tag), in reality, the cost-per-GB is competitive with other high-end SSDs when you get to the 240GB and above options"
Those are just very high-end SAS cables, so yes.
What about the ioDrive? They have to use PCIe because SATA isnt fast enough.
I think you're wrong. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
Probably. The point is that it's a whole new drive interconnect. They have another product that is a standalone card which supports 4 drives in a RAID. These drives only come with a card because it's a new interface technology and they are assuming you won't have a port for it yet. It's an open standard so they are gambling on it eventually becoming the standard for SSDs and having it built into motherboards and such.
How about the drives in this review?
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=1007&type=expert&pid=4
Looks to me like one of them is breaking 600MB/sec which is faster than even SATA-3 can handle.
None of this is to mention access time/overhead which is another reason to go to PCIe directly. Rather than doing PCIe -> SATA -> drive's controller, cut out the middle man. I'm not saying it is the best idea in all cases, but it seems to work when performance needs to be the absolute highest.
Same physical connector with different electrical wiring. Now we can fry all those expensive SAS parts. Yay! I don't see this taking off. The storage industry is moving to SAS 6Gb/s now.
none
Is that the Monster Cable version?
My question exactly. One miniSAS connector would give them 6Gb*4 = 24Gbps = ~2400GB/s (including overhead) - a lot more than enough bandwidth
Maybe to save the costs of SAS HBA (at least 200-300$) and avoid paying royalties to T10?
From what I gather it was cheaper and quicker for OCZ to co-opt an existing physical standard than roll their own. All the customer needs to do is source good quality SAS cables, which are in plentiful supply.
Are you joking? Because the bandwidth has the same limitations this company (and all the other ssd makers) are trying to find a way to break free of.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Maybe to save the costs of SAS HBA (at least 200-300$)
That's the reason. OCZ found some really cheap obsolete Silicon Image PCI-X RAID controllers and PCIe-to-PCI-X bridge chips in a warehouse somewhere and decided to kludge together some "SSDs".