SATA expres (SATA 3.2)

Drethstoff · February 13, 2013

I was reading around the interwebs and saw rumors that they are no longer developing sata. From some more scrouging around I found some sata connection called sata express. Apparently, it will use the pci-e slot but use sata protocols across it and increasing transfer speeds from sata 6gbps to anywhere from 8-16gbps.

Seems interesting.

It seems to make sense to me since most of the highest end ssds are now using a pci-e interface. I know that some of these drivers have compatibility issues with certain motherboards or the moon didn't quite line up on the night that you are installing the drive. Any how, I don't think sata branding is going away but I feed that the connectors that today we call sata ports will be nothing more than pci-e express lands with a sata protocol controlling the functions of the drives.

Feedback?

Whaler_99 · February 13, 2013

Yes, this is what I have been reading as well. The SATA interface as we know it is maxed out with the SATA3 protocol. I wonder if someone is working on some sort of multi plexing technology to boost it? But, definately looks like PCI-e based drives will be the future. The latest generation of these are actually pretty good and I know Intel is getting a lot of experience in this arena with some of their enterprise database solutions.

Much like when the X25 and M25 came out and Intel lead the way for some time before the others caught up, I think we will see seomthing like this again from Intel first. Be interesting though to see what more traditional drive manufacturers like WD and Seagate have in mind. For mechanical, yes, SATA3 will be fine for some time but I wonder if they are also working on some new protocols...

Eric1024 · February 13, 2013

I think part of the reason they are moving away from sata is that there is inherent latency in having to go through a (sata) controller, as opposed to going directly through a pci-e interface. Though perhaps I'm misunderstanding.

Drethstoff · February 14, 2013

Considering that thunderbolt not only carries PCIe, Displayport and DC power. It can be daisy chained like display port but you can have hard drives and in rare cases (around the time of this post) a box that contains PCIe lanes (Magma?) that are theoretically able to run graphics cards that would normally only run in desktops. It would seem to me that thunderbolt has a very good chance of becoming a much more popular standard due to its abilities to perform tasks easily and cleanly.

That's not to say that other undisclosed technologies aren't on the way. I'm just saying for the convenience and the slowly growing amount of motherboards built for windows that contain the thunderbolt connector. We might see an influx of motherboards that come with thunderbolt as standard. This is all speculation though.

But the computer industry being the way it is; meaning organizations like MPEG, JEDEC, HDMI, VESA, and PCI-SIG(the pci express people). These are just a few of the organizations that have command on how a computer will operate through which types of interfaces.