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."

Comments

Funny how things come full circle

[smead]

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.