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"

Comments

Bad hardware design.

[GiveBenADollar]

From the website: 'Whatever you do, don't plug an HSDL device into a SAS RAID card (or vice versa)! '

Although I dislike proprietary connectors for generic signals, I dislike interchangeable connectors for different signals even more. Can someone with a bit more knowledge explain why this could ever be a good idea, or how this is not going to smoke hardware.

Re:sata (the channel) is NOT the issue

[Kjella]

Wow, what a clueless post. SATA-150 can't sustain more than 150MB/s and there's many SSDs that go beyond that. The fastest Crucial even goes beyond SATA 3 Gbps on sustained reads. Working for a HDD manufacturer or something?

One PCIe x4 per SFF-8087, I think

[bill_mcgonigle]

The illustrations all seem to show an x8 card, but I think what they're saying is they multiplex a PCIe lane over each pair in the SFF-8087 cable. So, eventually you'll be able to run x16 out of a card to your drive bay, and use that now for a 4x4 config, but perhaps a single x16 config in the future.

In short, a slower PCIe extension cord using existing cables (as opposed to the oddball PCIe external cables). This will probably put pressure on mobo vendors to add more x16 slots. I regularly build storage servers with 16 and 24 drive bays, and it looks like top-end now are Tyan AMD boards with 4 x16 slots. I'd like to see, for instance, a SuperMicro with 6 PCIe x16 slots and dual Intel sockets (though I'm using AMD 12-core more and more lately). PCIe 3.0 is due out in a couple months, so probably it will be there - OCZ could also update to the faster coding rate.

Re:sata (the channel) is NOT the issue

[Surt]

There is a whole cluster of consumer drives today pushing ~275MB/s out of sata 3gb's 300MB/s limit. That's safely within the range of 'sata limited' allowing for a very small amount of controller overhead.