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New Serial ATA Standards Target SSDs, Tablets
crookedvulture writes "SATA-IO has devised a couple of new storage interfaces optimized for solid-state drives. To serve high-performance SSDs that are fast approaching the 6Gbps ceiling imposed by the current Serial ATA specification, the SATA Express standard will meld the Serial ATA software stack with PCI Express to offer up to 16Gbps of bandwidth. SATA Express isn't expected to be completed until the end of the year, but the new uSSD standard looks to be ready for prime time. Designed for tablets and ultraportables, uSSD sticks with current 6Gbps speeds but ditches traditional Serial ATA connectors, allowing SSD controller chips to be soldered directly to motherboards. SanDisk already has a 128GB uSSD primed for ultrabooks."
uSSD sticks with current 6Gbps speeds but ditches traditional Serial ATA connectors, allowing SSD controller chips to be soldered directly to motherboards.
You best be joking.
That was about my response as well.
I can't imagine anything i'd want my tablet to have 16Gbps disk speeds for..
That just seems like a stupid waste for a tablet or other small form device.
Now when the SSD goes out(and they do fail, sometimes faster than harddrives) the whole computer is trash without doing reflow on the motherboard. This idea was clearly made by OEMs who prefer you buy another computer than fix the one you have
Sounds like OCZ's IBIS just got standardized or copied.
http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-ibis-3-5-high-speed-data-link-ssd.html/
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
SSD controller, not the drive itself.
It IS the entire SSD in a single solderable package.
Hard drives in PCs start out with a proprietary interface by Segate that becomes a defacto standard. It needs an interface controller to tell the drive what to do. That controller sits on the ISA bus. Speeds increase, drives become bigger, they move the controller onto the hard drive. The ISA bus still connects to the controller, and the controller still tells the drive what to do, it's just that we now call the connection between the motherboard and the controller the IDE (integrated drive electronics) bus, but it's still the ISA bus. Speeds increase, now we increase the speeds of the IDE bus and add features, it slowly moves away from the ISA bus as the IDE controllers get more complicated. Speeds increase and having that bus as a parallel interface doesn't cut it, so we invent SATA. A SATA controller sits on the PCI bus and tells the drive's controller what to do. Speeds increase and now we're back to directly connecting the hard drive to the PCI (now PCI-E, but same parallel to serial transition) bus. -- Full Circle.
The NVM Express spec is already released. This is targeted for PCIe SSD's.
http://www.nvmexpress.org/
USB 3 trumps SATA, SATA trumps USB 3...Thunderbolt trumps... ...firewire?
I agree w/ you on stamping a controller chip on the MB. But the use of the interface connector - if an SSD is orders of magnitude faster than an HDD, and there's not much else on the PCI-X bus, then why not? Only case where I can think of a justification is notebooks & tablets, where you don't have extra SATA slots, and the device could use a lower power consumption as well. Another thing worth noting - SSD comes into the market at almost the same time that the industry is moving to 64-bit. That offers the potential for major paradigm changes - one can have a memory map where part of the region is dedicated to DRAM, another dedicated to SSD, another to I/O devices and so on, w/o worrying about ever running short. If such a thing is attained, then it makes sense to try and maximize the speed of SSDs (as long as one doesn't reduce their long term endurance or data retention in the process. For game consoles and other such apps, an SSD w/ an USB interface would be more appropriate - just connect an external drive to a console w/o mucking w/ SATA buses or what else, and just have the thing work. Use SATA purely for internal purposes. It's not always about monopolizing - it's just a case of making good use of existing standards.
Since the internals of an SSD are NAND flash, it will not be a random read. NAND flash devices read or write data in pages, and the sector/block size defines how much you read or write. But you never read a byte, or word, or quad-word @ a time: you read a complete page. If random reads or programming was needed, one would use a NOR flash for that purpose. As a NOR flash is what is used when the system boots, and contains all the configuration info, it's probably worthwhile to expand its density some to capture whatever is needed when PC needs to go instant on. The HDD ain't where the system goes to find such things, and all systems that have instant on don't come w/ an SSD. NOR flash - the 4Mb flash that's typically on motherboards - is the key when it comes to rebooting.