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Seagate Debuts World's Fastest NVMe SSD With 10GBps Throughput (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Seagate has just unveiled what it is calling "the world's fastest SSD," and the performance differential between it and the next closest competitive offering is significant, if their claims are true. The SSD, which Seagate today announced is in "production-ready" form employs the NVMe protocol to help it achieve breakneck speeds. So just how fast is it? Seagate says that the new SSD is capable of 10GB/sec of throughput when used in 16-lane PCIe slots. Seagate notes that this is 4GB/sec faster than the next-fastest competing SSD solution. The company is also working on a second, lower-performing variant that works in 8-lane PCIe slots and has a throughput of 6.7GB/sec. Seagate sees the second model as a more cost-effect SSD for businesses that want a high performing SSD, but want to keep costs and power consumption under control. Seagate isn't ready yet to discuss pricing for its blazing fast SSDs, and oddly haven't disclosed a model name either, but it does say that general availability for its customers will open up during the summer.
Hard to grok. You can fill up that new Samsung 16TB drive in 2 min 40 sec.
Intel boards with LGA 2011-3 sockets have 40 PCIe lanes available coming off the CPU.
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Simply, no.
You are right about the physical PCIe slot connectors.
You could be right about the physical PCIe slot wiring, but in many boards with two x16 slots (assuming that there are only two, with the chipset-wired slots not being physically x16) both are electrically wired to be x16. You do not have to put a card in a specific one of the two slots to have an operational x16 connection.
You are wrong about the functional connections. I'll assume an Intel-compantible motherboard since that is what I'm familiar with. AMD-compatible motherboards could be different - I simply do not know.
Intel CPUs provide 16 PCIe lanes for connection to the x16 slot(s). If you have one card inserted, that slot will be allocated all 16 lanes. If you have two cards inserted in a board providing two slots, each slot will be allocated 8 lanes. In Z170 boards there could be three CPU-connected slots, and with three cards inserted in such a board, the slots would be allocated x8/x4/x4. See here.
Everything else runs off chipset-provided PCIe lanes, which are connected to the CPU by a PCIe x4-like . Thus, for example, in my Ivy Bridge system (Z68), there is a third PCIe x16 physical slot that is PCIe x4 electrically wired and functionally PCIe x1-connected unless I set a BIOS option that disables certain other peripherals (USB3 and eSATA add-ons).
If you connect your GPU and this SSD at the same time, you will be either x8/x8 (if using CPU-connected slots) or x16/x4 (if using one CPU-connected slot and one chipset-connected slot). That x4 would also be shared with every other I/O connection in the system due to the DMI "x4" like bandwidth limitation.
PCIe PLXs switches add lanes to slots, but do not add further connections to the CPU or chipset. At the end of the day you're sharing either the 16 CPU-provided lanes or the 4 chipset provided lanes in Intel's consumer-oriented boards. You have to go to the LGA2011 socket and workstation chipsets to gain more available bandwidth to the CPU.