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LSI announces third generation SandForce SSD controller, with PCI Express support
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7520/lsi-announces-sandforce-sf3700-sata-and-pcie-in-one-silicon
Solid state drives got off to a rocky start, with the industry maturing greatly over the course of 2009 and 2010. But by early 2011, we had Marvell and SandForce controllers that supported SATA 3 and were significantly bottlenecked by the SATA interface. Since then, Samsung, Indilinx, and LAMD have joined the fray with marginally better controllers, but not vastly so. Samsung and Indilinx (now owned by OCZ, which may be going bankrupt) had the opportunity to look at what went right and wrong on their earlier controllers and redo anything they want in pursuit of a better SSD controller. And while they largely succeeded in making a better controller, it wasn't really all that much better than what Marvell and SandForce offered in early 2011.
SSD manufacturers have known for years that the SATA interface is a meaningful bottleneck to SSDs. Some manufacturers, especially OCZ, made PCI Express SSDs by putting several SATA SSDs on a single card in some sort of RAID. But this had problems with complexity, cost, and reliability. There were some SSDs with a native PCI Express interface, such as those from Fusion-io as far back as 2009, but those were very, very expensive.
SandForce's answer to that was to build a mainstream SSD controller that supported both SATA and PCI Express, so it could be used with either connection. It probably didn't hurt that SandForce has since been bought by LSI, a major manufacturer of RAID controllers. And look at the numbers that they're promising: 1800 MB/s throughput in both reads and writes, 150K IOPS random read, 81K IOPS random write, and 99.99% of 4k writes in under 170 microseconds. The first two of those are much faster than anything you can get on SATA today; indeed, 1800 MB/s is triple the theoretical cap of SATA 3.
But will this actually matter to consumers? For a while now, I've been of the opinion that when comparing the good SSDs to each other, speed doesn't particularly matter. If you're loading a game and it takes 20 seconds of hard drive work and 10 seconds of CPU work, it takes 20 seconds to load. If you replace that hard drive with an SSD that can do the storage work in 4 seconds, now the game takes 10 seconds to load. Replace the SSD by a faster SSD that can do the storage work in 2 seconds and the game still takes 10 seconds to load. While this is a simplification of the situation for a number of reasons, if the "slower" SSD is fast enough that you're not waiting on it, there isn't much to be gained by swapping in a faster SSD.
And there's also the question of whether LSI can actually deliver what they promise. For that, we'll have to wait a few months. But until then, the gauntlet has been thrown down. We'll see if any other SSD controller manufacturers go this route. SandForce controllers are still the only consumer ones that compress data.
Comments
It will matter so long as it's not triple the cost.
Realistically, it should be (aside from the R&D) mostly cost neutral to make your SSD SATA or PCI Express. I'm sure there will be some price premium associated with the latter for a bit, but only until other manufacturers catch on.
There are a lot of benefits from side-stepping the entire SATA host - the first one that comes to mind is that you don't need a power or data cable or a hard drive bay -- it's a card that plugs into the motherboard, and it gets all it's power and data connections from the slot it's plugged into. That certainly makes cable management easier, the card is nice and small and tidy right near the motherboard, and it makes the entire interior of the case much easier to deal with (particularly on SFF builds and in laptops - while laptops have had SATA/SAS style plug-ins for HDD/SSDs, imagine no drive/SATA cables at all in a case). Maybe a minor benefit, but a tangible one, aside from the obvious speed/latency benefits.
Another benefit - older computers that don't already have SATA2/3 - they can get these speed benefits immediately, without needing an add-on SATA card. My old Bloomfield X58 could see some really nice SSD speeds without having to fork over for a new SATA3 card, rather than the on-board SATA2 I've been living with since it's inception.
Of course, one big downside to that is capacity -- you only have a finite small number of PCI slots, and most motherboards come with plenty of SATA channels (at least 4, some upwards of 12) and you can pop a lot more SATA channels in on PCI cards. You can easily make huge arrays of SATA drives - rediculous numbers of drives on the same computer if you really wanted to. You won't really be able to do that with PCI Express-based storage (although you could get crazy with 16-lane PCI3.0 implementations).
And the counter to that is that most consumer PCs only use 1 or 2 drives, and very very few people need more hard drive options than that, combined with the fact that SATA and PCI Express drive options aren't mutually exclusive...
I don't really see a lot of down sides here unless they try to really crank on the price.
My latest laptop has Samsung 4-channel PCI Express SSD, it's noticeably faster than my old SATA2 SSD laptop, or even my desktop SATA2 SSDs, but I couldn't say how much of that speed is associated with the SSD and how much of it is the new CPU (went from Montevina to Haswell, a bit of a difference there). It's benched over 1000 MB/s by third parties, official specs only put it at 775, I've never tried it myself because, as you say, it's reached that level of "fast enough" that I don't really care.
Where do I buy a case with no drive bay slots?
I don't use a CD/DVD drive often enough to need one mounted in my case--I have a USB DVD drive I used to load Windows and the occasional movie when I can't stream. My current SSD is mounted in a drive bay slot only because there are few easy places to secure it for transport. I could easily zip-tie my SATA SSD somewhere if I didn't have drive bays. PCI SSDs will only result in even more wasted metal and space for the drive bay slots.
Also, do we have any idea if Windows natively supports PCI drives? I don't want to go back something similar to the days of needing to use a floppy drive just to load RAID drivers so you could install Windows.