SATA Express as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2015-05-07
·
956 words · ~4 min read
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if you've been watching the development of solid state drives or ssds you might
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have noticed a trend over the last few years Peak throughput the maximum speed
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that you can read from or write to an SSD was increasing by Leaps and Bounds
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approaching 600 megabytes per second and then poof it
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stopped now that's not because ssds can't be faster but because SATA 3 6
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gbit per second the interface that they use to connect to your PC tops out at
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around that speed creating a bottle NE of course this problem is nothing new
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history lesson time Serial ATA or SATA was actually
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introduced way back in 2003 to replace
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parallel ATA or paa which you might remember as those bulky flat gray cables
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that you saw inside your parents old Packard Bell P topped out at around 133
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megabytes per second which was fine for slow mechanical hard drives and since
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ssds were virtually unknown in the consumer PC space there wasn't much need
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for anything faster for most users I mean even the jump from P 100 to P 133
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was considered Superfluous at the time with the first revision of SATA we saw
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throughput modestly increased to 150 megabytes per second then it doubled to
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300 megabytes per second on the second rev and doubled again to 600 megabytes
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per second on the third to try to keep up with user demands as ssds became more
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ubiquitous and at this point you may be asking okay then lonus why don't they
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just double it again and give us 1,00 megabytes per second of throughput with
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those little SATA cables that are so good for case air flow well one of the
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main hurdles is actually power simply boosting the speed of the SATA
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connection Beyond 6 gbit per second takes a lot more juice so the powers
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that be decided to go in a bit of a different direction enter SATA Express
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unlike previous SATA revisions this isn't just a faster version of the same
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fundamental technology SATA Express is
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truly different in that it really isn't its own interface at all what C Express
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does is it connects your ssds directly to your computer's PCI Express Lanes PCI
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Express is such an efficient and fast interface that even the previous
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revision PCIe 2.0 wouldn't bottleneck
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the latest graphics cards in most situations so it should be pretty easy
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to imagine the performance gains you could get by using PCIe to connect to
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your storage devices modern implementations of SATA Express can
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achieve anywhere from one Gigabyte per second to 4 gabt per second and can
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continue to scale in the future there are some other cool things about SATA
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Express 2o one is called m.2 which is okay not quite SATA Express but a
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closely related standard that allows little tiny high performance ssds to be
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mounted on addin cards with m.2 slots
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and a second is called NVMe or nonvolatile Memory Express this is a new
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logical way to access storage that is correctly optimized for highpe speed
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solid state devices it replaces ahci the
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older driver that controls SATA drives and was designed for magnetic drives
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NVMe was specifically made for PCI
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Express based ssds and will offer lower latency and take better advantage of the
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high degree of parallelization that is possible with these sorts of devices
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among other performance improvements well lonus all this sounds just peachy
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but how do I get my hands on SATA Express the answer is that you can't yet
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many motherboards with either an Intel h97 or z97 chipset will have SATA
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Express ports which are thankfully backwards compatible with a couple of
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SATA plugs to regular 6 gbit per second drives but at this time there are no
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SATA Express drives available to general consumers to plug into them of course if
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you're a real speed demon who just can't wait remember that right now you can
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pick up true PCI Express ssds that slot
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directly into the board or m.2 ssds that
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also utilize the PCI Express Bus as I mentioned before both of these will be
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able to give you speeds far beyond what you'd be able to get with SATA 3 in
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theory although in practice ah the difference might not be
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that noticeable to most people speaking of differences that are noticeable to
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