Will PCI-Express-Based Solid-State Drives Become More Popular in the Near Future?

[Stonerboy779]

Samsung already have PCIe based SSDs and have been mass producing them for mainly the ultra book and laptop market for a while now.

They do however have a new PCIe based SSD that they debuted recently but it is very much so an enterprise product. You can get it in a 1.6TB capacity with 3000MB/s sequential read speeds.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20130717231259_Samsung_Develops_Enterprise_Class_S SD_with_3000MB_s_Read_Speed_NVMe_Interface.html

[richardlawson1489]

I think PCI-express based solid state drives become more popular. It is a new way to adding the speed state drive to server and storage devices.

[Konrad]

huge lol,

PCIe SSDs (in which I include M.2 SSDs and NVMe SSDs) have been available to consumers for years now. There's many offerings, but Samsung and Intel dominate the consumer market - partly because their M.2/NVMe SSDs are standard issue in many pre-built laptop/gaming/HEDT systems, partly because so many enthusiasts/gamers are willing to pay any price for top performance and brand swag. Check your local NCIX, newegg, or ebay sites.

I've been using a 1600GB PCIe2X8 CoreRise Comay E28 BladeDrive at home since early 2014. And I was a "late adopter" who actively resisted using SSDs for years.

I'm sure there's plenty of bigger, faster, better (and costlier) Enterprise PCIe SSD tech out there I know nothing about.

[AmEv]

Holy cow, just 4 years ago, I also thought 3Gb/s was fast enough.

Now, I'm looking at investing in a RAID 0 Intel 750 U.2 setup.

To be fair, 4 years ago, M.2, and even U.2, didn't even exist. When we heard "PCIe SSDs", it was an SSD that took up a physical x1, x4, xWhatever slot, not a thin board that happened to use PCIe channeling.

[Konrad]

Multiple PCIe SSDs in RAID0, lol.

I see new Seagate Nytro XP7200 (3.8TB and 7.7TB capacities) which use PCIe3x16 NVMe, rated up to 10GB/s sequential Read. An enterprise product at enterprise prices.

I understand PCIe Gen3 x4 is some sort of "standard volume" unit in scaling server platforms. And it's the preconfigured lane limit on M.2/U.2 interfaces. And it's a whole lot of bidirectional bandwidth, although real-world storage devices rarely approach the theoretical limit of 3938MB/s.

What I don't understand is why PCIe SSDs aren't really available in anything other than x1, x2, and x4 capacities. Many consumer motherboards have one or two x4 slots that are good for little other than a PC audio card and/or SSD drive card (and/or some kind of adapter card, if your motherboard somehow doesn't already have enough dozens of fast USB ports and gigabit network plugs). But most consumer motherboards have multiple x16 slots. And I'd rather have a x16 PCIe SSD (theoretically capable of up to 17553MB/s) instead of a x4 PCIe SSD, lol.

(Although, as it turns out, my primary computer is all fulla multi-GPU madness, so my current PCIe Gen2 x8 SSD - serviced off the PCH, not the CPU - fits in quite nicely. Incidentally, it's old SSD tech built around four old SandForce controllers, it achieves high throughput by basically being a hardwired striped RAID of four discrete SSDs working as a single drive on the single card. And it cost my boss way more than I'll comfortably admit, lol.)