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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."
It's for tablets. You simply don't have room inside for big bulky connectors that nobody is ever going to get access to.
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.
MacBook Airs are flying off the shelve with RAM already soldered onto the MB. Soldering on the SSD allows a little more space (perhaps for more battery) or for even more weight savings.
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
They already have. SATA-over-mPCIe has been around since the original eeePC - the SATA SSD it uses was mounted in a mini-PCIe looking slot. But it wasn't, since it ran SATA signals over it.
A more recent example started since the 2010 Macbook Airs which had a bog-stadanrd SATA based SSD in something that looked like a mini-PCIe slot - again, it was SATA signals wired to the slot.
This spec just makes it official so everyone can build adapters, SSDs and laptops based on it and be standardized across the entire line. otherwise you'd have formfactor issues, possible pinout issues, etc.
At those kinds of speeds, you start talking about a system that goes from completely off to completely on in a second. When you want to hibernate, you dump everything in memory over to the disk. When you turn back on, you take a moment to find the disk, and pull the entire memory image back over. There is no boot, there is no shutdown. You only need enough memory to handle the actual in-use programs, and anything else could be painlessly paged out, meaning you never have to close programs.
It's an order of magnitude slower than RAM, but an order of magnitude faster than hard disks. Right smack in the middle in order to offer all sorts of cool little tricks.
It would probably be most accurate to think of this "uSSD" as a faster, more PC-architecture-oriented version of the "eMMC" JEDEC standard for soldering flash directly onto a motherboard, with a lower board space, pin count, and controller requirement than raw flash chips.
"eMMC", which is basically an MMC card's guts in a BGA package, is already quite popular in things like cellphones(ever wonder why some cellphones filesystem names suggest that they have an MMC card that they don't really? It's because they do, in software terms...) "uSSD" will, presumably, be the big brother of that standard, putting SATA signals and power over a standardized BGA arrangement, rather than using MMC signals and power...
Manufacturers want to be able to switch flash suppliers without doing board redesigns or modifying flash drivers in their bootloaders. Flash suppliers want to be able to do whatever they feel like, so long as a thin interface layer is preserved on top....
Because:
-there are thousands of chips out there that have a built-in SATA interface
-BIOSes and kernels already know SATA, and developers are already used to working with it
-MMC/SD/eMMC doesn't come close to the throughput of SATA
-manufacturers don't like vendor lock-in, and SATA is the most popular non-embedded SSD interface
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.
mini-pcie.
So, you mean that 2% will continue to work until the end of time?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
You are arguing against speeding up of computers with modern technology. You are on the wrong side of history. If you wish to go that route, I suggest you might want to check out these used Hayes modems I've got because nobody could ever physically read text at over 240 chars/sec.
Programs have grown in size over the years, in case you hadn't noticed. You may be certainly happy with your copy of PFS:Write on 8 inch floppy in your S-100 bus CP/M machine, but the rest of the world marches on. Just because *you personally* do not have any need for speed doesn't mean other people don't or shouldn't have a desire for speedy computers.
I'll take a saturated bus at 6Gb/sec (600MB/sec (with overhead)) over ATA-6 (100MB/sec) any day.
Your argument sounds like the yammering of an old man on his porch telling me that bias ply tires were just fine back in the 70s and should be just fine today, honestly.
--
BMO
If the SSD drive is on the PCI-X card itself (which it'd have to be to attain that 16Gb/s speed), then why not put the SATA controller chip on that, instead of the motherboard? This is assuming that the motherboard is not going to support SATA HDD's as well that are separately connected to it. But if a SSD is connected, have a way for the motherboard controller to be disabled and unused, or used only for a connected HDD, would make more sense. I disagree w/ the others who've said that the entire SSD is in the chip. No, given the densities you have for NAND flash, you need several of those to get to the densities desired. The controller has to be connected to the NAND flashes in order to do things like ECC and file system management.