S-ATA 4 ? the future of mass storage .

[PeterK]

Hello y'all , i have a question . 

What do you think the new storage interface is going be ? I mean S-ATA 3 is still ok so to speak , but as far as i know S-ATA 4 will not be a thing .

M.2 conector is fine and fancy , but what's gonna happen , if i want to plugin 3-4   2.5" ssd's that are Nvme pcie ?? . Currently there is no such a standard/interface that will allow you to connect an Nvme drive with a cable . And if they make cables for it , and replace the sata connectors with m.2 connectors , than the cables are going to be way to wide (IDE all  over again)  .  

Sooo.what do  you guys think of a future storage interface/connector?  . We can't just use  sata3 forever,  also  we can't mount 3.5" hdd's onto the motherboard .

I  wonder what'sthe next sata ,and don't tell me SAS.

[HanZie82]

Nah im guessing SATA will be phased out for a PCIe version, thats not NVME but a Sata variant of it. But Sata will be on motherboards for the next 15 20 years im guessin.

[Faisal A]

When hard drive bottleneck the sata ports, motherboard manufacturers will probably start using it, especially for server hardware

[mariushm]

There are no plans for SATA IV or higher ... right now the standard's at SATA 3.4

 

There was some concept a few years ago to have SATA in a pci-e slot ... basically,

 

I think an easy way would be to have mechanical drives move to pci-e 4.0 x1, which would allow up to 2 GB/s with a single pci-e lane. However, pci-e 4.0 would limit cables to around 30cm or less while pci-e 3.0 is less picky. Even pci-e 3.0 would give you 970 MB/s max.

Basically, how hard would it be to add a 1-2$  nvme controller on the circuit board on the bottom of a mechanical drive and get rid of sata altogether? 

 

We could also have the equivalent of port multiplier cards, basically have a pci-e switch chip, which takes 1 pci-e lane and creates up to 4 pci-e x1 lanes, so each drive would still have 2 GB / 4 = 490 MB/s if all drives are used at same time.

 

Maybe we'd have a connector like SFF-8784 with 4 pci-e lanes, which can be split into 4 pci-e x1 lanes

[HanZie82]

Yeah they wont make new stuff thats the same or less then current standards.
We will use Sata until its to slow then we just use NVME direct connect.

Company's think with their wallets. No need for new if old is good enough.

[PeterK]

43 minutes ago, Faisal A said:

When hard drive bottleneck the sata ports, motherboard manufacturers will probably start using it, especially for server hardware

Sata ssd's could be faster if was on something faster than sata3 lets's say in gigabyte range , so there is already a bottleneck by the interface .

If you mean HDD's bottlenecking the interface , than well , i guess you're right , but that's never gonna happen . Top tier hdd's max out at 250mb/s transfers (not taking into account the 15000RPM drives).

However i'm not really considering hdd's in the future , but a couple of "sataX" ssd's at 1-1.5gb/s with cables . I mean how many m.2 slots can you realistically integrate in a standard or mini ATX board ? 2-4 . Also they are more expensive , more fragile , can't be swapped on the fly . 

 

[PeterK]

20 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

Yeah they wont make new stuff thats the same or less then current standards.
We will use Sata until its to slow then we just use NVME direct connect.

Company's think with their wallets. No need for new if old is good enough.

Well i'm waiting to see motherboards with 6pieces of  M.2-pcie connectors with cables then ... , cause i'm pretty sure you can't realistically fit more than 2-3 m.2 drives on the motherboard itself .

[HanZie82]

2 minutes ago, PeterK said:

Sata ssd's could be faster if was on something faster than sata3 lets's say in gigabyte range , so there is already a bottleneck by the interface .

If you mean HDD's bottlenecking the interface , than well , i guess you're right , but that's never gonna happen . Top tier hdd's max out at 250mb/s transfers (not taking into account the 15000RPM drives).

However i'm not really considering hdd's in the future , but a couple of "sataX" ssd's at 1-1.5gb/s with cables . I mean how many m.2 slots can you realistically integrate in a standard or mini ATX board ? 2-4 . Also they are more expensive , more fragile , can't be swapped on the fly . 

 

The only reason im thinking SATA could go is becuase the connection requests. 1 per cycle and 65000 in the que. NVM alkready has 65000 per cycle.
For mechanical HDD's Sata2 (maybe 3) is more then good enough.
But for solid storage yeah im guessing we gonna need more PCIe lanes. Seeing how AMD is upping the game on having a lot more lanes in the consumer models is good for the future. imho.

[HanZie82]

2 minutes ago, PeterK said:

Well i'm waiting to see motherboards with 6pieces of  M.2-pcie connectors with cables then ... , cause i'm pretty sure you can't realistically fit more than 2-3 m.2 drives on the motherboard itself .

You not heard of PCIe plugin slot with 4 M.2 slots?

[PeterK]

29 minutes ago, mariushm said:

There are no plans for SATA IV or higher ... right now the standard's at SATA 3.4

 

There was some concept a few years ago to have SATA in a pci-e slot ... basically,

 

I think an easy way would be to have mechanical drives move to pci-e 4.0 x1, which would allow up to 2 GB/s with a single pci-e lane. However, pci-e 4.0 would limit cables to around 30cm or less while pci-e 3.0 is less picky. Even pci-e 3.0 would give you 970 MB/s max.

Basically, how hard would it be to add a 1-2$  nvme controller on the circuit board on the bottom of a mechanical drive and get rid of sata altogether? 

 

We could also have the equivalent of port multiplier cards, basically have a pci-e switch chip, which takes 1 pci-e lane and creates up to 4 pci-e x1 lanes, so each drive would still have 2 GB / 4 = 490 MB/s if all drives are used at same time.

 

Maybe we'd have a connector like SFF-8784 with 4 pci-e lanes, which can be split into 4 pci-e x1 lanes

That's pretty much what i think too , it's just a bit odd that there was no real advancement in this particular department , yes i know m.2 is a 'new' thing , but s-ata 3 is 10 years old (i think)

[HanZie82]

1 minute ago, PeterK said:

That's pretty much what i think too , it's just a bit odd that there was no real advancement in this particular department , yes i know m.2 is a 'new' thing , but s-ata 3 is 10 years old (i think)

Just fyi M.2 is just the slot. You can have PCI Sata and PCIe trough M.2 slots. (maybe more but i cant recall atm). Oh and USB too.

[PeterK]

Just now, HanZie82 said:

You not heard of PCIe plugin slot with 4 M.2 slots?

I mean that's an option , but it still mounts into the motherboard , and this way taking even more space . In my opinion it's a lot better to have the 'freedom' of the cables.

[mariushm]

1 minute ago, PeterK said:

Well i'm waiting to see motherboards with 6pieces of  M.2-pcie connectors with cables then ... , cause i'm pretty sure you can't realistically fit more than 2-3 m.2 drives on the motherboard itself .

you can have adapter cards in pci-e x16 slot with 4 m.2 connectors.

Also, with pci-e 4.0 you could have 2 lanes for each m.2 connector and have 8 m.2 connectors on each card, if the cpu or chipset supports splitting the x16 into 8 x2 segments (or have a controller/switcher chip on the adapter card)

Remember there's nothing stopping us from using sizes smaller than M.2 2280

You could have a M.2 2242 SSD - imagine a QLC SSD with two 512 GB NAND chips, one on top and one on bottom, and the controller :

 

 

The Intel 660p SQL series does up to 3.5 GB/s read speeds so moving to a pci-e 4.0 x2 (3.95 GB/s) would not cause problems.

So you could have 8 x 1-2 TB QLC drives on an adapter card that's as big as a video card, maybe less.

[HanZie82]

Just now, PeterK said:

I mean that's an option , but it still mounts into the motherboard , and this way taking even more space . In my opinion it's a lot better to have the 'freedom' of the cables.

Agreed the cable give the freedom. But the cable also gives resistance. Resistance kills speed. So yeah. I'm not expecting storage to be much cabled later on. Maybe server systems. But consumer hard drives will just be directly attached to the motherboard for the convenience of the speed.

[PeterK]

1 minute ago, HanZie82 said:

Just fyi M.2 is just the slot. You can have PCI Sata and PCIe trough M.2 slots. (maybe more but i cant recall atm). Oh and USB too.

M.2 is usually pci-e based , yes , but everyone always says (at least used to say) that we don't have enough pci-e lanes for more than a couple of drives . And if we do have , why don't they put 6 connectors , and make cables for the connector ?  

[PeterK]

Just now, HanZie82 said:

Agreed the cable give the freedom. But the cable also gives resistance. Resistance kills speed. So yeah. I'm not expecting storage to be much cabled later on. Maybe server systems. But consumer hard drives will just be directly attached to the motherboard for the convenience of the speed.

I can understand that , but i don't like it

[HanZie82]

2 minutes ago, PeterK said:

M.2 is usually pci-e based , yes , but everyone always says (at least used to say) that we don't have enough pci-e lanes for more than a couple of drives . And if we do have , why don't they put 6 connectors , and make cables for the connector ?  

Because the PCIe lanes come from the CPU. my 1700X has 20 lanes, 16 for the GPU and the last 4 for the Storage.
But that is shared with SATA as well so it wont use full bandwidth (for my 970EVO+). Hell it couldn't even if it wanted to. The storage isn't that fast.

But in the future they will just have more PCIe lanes. Also USB 3.1 is on a PCIe lane. Some SATA controllers use it. So many stuff can (and does) use them PCIe lanes. Since its such a nice and fast connection almost directly to the CPU.

 

[PeterK]

3 minutes ago, mariushm said:

you can have adapter cards in pci-e x16 slot with 4 m.2 connectors.

Also, with pci-e 4.0 you could have 2 lanes for each m.2 connector and have 8 m.2 connectors on each card, if the cpu or chipset supports splitting the x16 into 8 x2 segments (or have a controller/switcher chip on the adapter card)

Remember there's nothing stopping us from using sizes smaller than M.2 2280

You could have a M.2 2242 SSD - imagine a QLC SSD with two 512 GB NAND chips, one on top and one on bottom, and the controller :

 

 

The Intel 660p SQL series does up to 3.5 GB/s read speeds so moving to a pci-e 4.0 x2 (3.95 GB/s) would not cause problems.

So you could have 8 x 1-2 TB QLC drives on an adapter card that's as big as a video card, maybe less.

The adaptors are ok , i'm not saying they're not , but usually denser storage cost more for the same capacity , maybe that will change too .... , i mean  i'm just curious of what comes next . 

[HanZie82]

3 minutes ago, PeterK said:

The adaptors are ok , i'm not saying they're not , but usually denser storage cost more for the same capacity , maybe that will change too .... , i mean  i'm just curious of what comes next . 

Yeah thats very true, but everyday it gets cheaper.
I mean i bought 1TB of SSD space for the same price i bought a slow ass 160GB mechanical harddrive 10 years earlier...

 

(Ps still using the 160GB btw. hehehehe)

[mariushm]

1 minute ago, PeterK said:

M.2 is usually pci-e based , yes , but everyone always says (at least used to say) that we don't have enough pci-e lanes for more than a couple of drives . And if we do have , why don't they put 6 connectors , and make cables for the connector ?  

It's true chipsets have a limited number of pci-e lanes, but if the sata controller is removed from the chipset, the space on the die can be repurposed for pci-e lanes.

The problem is sata was designed from the start to be cheap ... the connectors are cheap, the cables are cheap, it's very easy to put in laptops. The sata controller inside a chipset connects to everything else using the equivalent of 1..4 pci-e lanes, typically just one or two lanes are used. So the 6 sata ports in total may only have 1-2 GB/s connection to the CPU. If you go with pci-e lanes for each drive, you have at least one pci-e lane for each drive.

 

Going with pci-e lanes means more precise made cables and connectors - you can see how much more expensive usb type-c connectors and cables are, and how you have some fancy pants usb type c headers for the front panel connectors on some boards.

Also, the problem is pci-e controllers use more power, and they have to use more power if you go with pci-e 4.0 - you can see how AMD had to go back to using a fan on the chipset because the pci-e 4.0 controller uses more power than pci-e 3.0

 

So yeah, they can add more pci-e lanes, but there are costs with that and disadvantages, and in some cases they're just not worth it.

See for example companies like backblaze or 45drives which just need to put 36-45 hard drives in a case and store data, not care about the actual speed.

SATA has its place, as SAS has, for some applications the 560 MB/s limitation is not a problem.

[mariushm]

7 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

Because the PCIe lanes come from the CPU. my 1700X has 20 lanes, 16 for the GPU and the last 4 for the Storage.
But that is shared with SATA as well so it wont use full bandwidth (for my 970EVO+). Hell it couldn't even if it wanted to. The storage isn't that fast.

No, it's not shared with SATA. You get 4 pci-e lanes from CPU for the M.2 connector. The SATA part from the M.2 connector comes from the chipset's sata controller.

The SATA controller is connected inside the chipset to a "highway" that's connected to CPU with a separate pci-e x4 link (3.0 or 4GB/s for pre-x570, 4.0 / 8GB/s for x570)

[PeterK]

4 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

Yeah thats very true, but everyday it gets cheaper.
I mean i bought 1TB of SSD space for the same price i bought a slow ass 160GB mechanical harddrive 10 years earlier...

 

(Ps still using the 160GB btw. hehehehe)

True that , i also have a 160gb wd drive , but i 'decomissioned' it 6-7 years ago

[HanZie82]

9 minutes ago, mariushm said:

No, it's not shared with SATA. You get 4 pci-e lanes from CPU for the M.2 connector. The SATA part from the M.2 connector comes from the chipset's sata controller.

The SATA controller is connected inside the chipset to a "highway" that's connected to CPU with a separate pci-e x4 link (3.0 or 4GB/s for pre-x570, 4.0 / 8GB/s for x570)

Hmm that gets me confused.
My CPU 1700X has 20 lanes. (1x16+1x4)
Where do the 8 lanes on my X470 mobo come from then? Is that from the chipset?
But then how does the CPU connect to this? As its not using PCIe lanes for the chipset right?

Or if you know howto google that lemme know. I just tried to not sound dumb and was clearly unsuccesful. hehehe


Edit: after some more googling, it might be that the 1700X does have 24 PCIe lanes and 4 of them are for the chipset and thus rarely mentioned. But im not sure.

[mariushm]

13 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

Hmm that gets me confused.
My CPU 1700X has 20 lanes. (1x16+1x4)
Where do the 8 lanes on my X470 mobo come from then? Is that from the chipset?
But then how does the CPU connect to this? As its not using PCIe lanes for the chipset right?

Or if you know howto google that lemme know. I just tried to not sound dumb and was clearly unsuccesful. hehehe


Edit: after some more googling, it might be that the 1700X does have 24 PCIe lanes and 4 of them are for the chipset and thus rarely mentioned. But im not sure.

AM4 processors have up to 24 pci-e lanes.

16 go to video cards

4 go to M.2 or other devices (motherboard maker can choose to use for 10g ethernet for example or something else)

4 go to chipset

 

The chipset creates 8 pci-e 2.0 (500MB/s per lane), which can go to various slots or additional m.2 connectors.

 

[PeterK]

6 minutes ago, mariushm said:

AM4 processors have up to 24 pci-e lanes.

16 go to video cards

4 go to M.2 or other devices (motherboard maker can choose to use for 10g ethernet for example or something else)

4 go to chipset

 

The chipset creates 8 pci-e 2.0 (500MB/s per lane), which can go to various slots or additional m.2 connectors.

 

well , this is not a lot . X16 is sorta kinda reserved for the video card , 4 is assigned to the chipset , and you get to have 4 pcie4 lanes for m.2 storage - this is how it looks . So no , pcie is still not enough for 6  m.2 pcie4-x4 drives (!at full speed) . If you choose to install https://www.sonnettech.com/product/m2-4x4-pcie-card.html something like that , your GPU bandwith will suffer (maybe won't even work with an 4 lanes)