There’s been a lot of press recently about what’s going on in the world of storage regarding the utilization of PCIe as a device interface. Of course, PCIe has been around a long time as a system bus, while SATA and SAS have been used as storage device interfaces. But with SSDs getting faster with every new product release, it’s become difficult for the traditional interfaces to keep up.
Some folks figure that PCIe is the solution to that problem. PCIe 3.0 operates at 1GB/s, which is faster than 600MB/s SATA. And with PCIe, it’s possible to add lanes to increase the overall bandwidth. The SATA Express spec from SATA-IO defines a client PCIe device as having up to 2 lanes of PCIe, which brings the speed up to 2GB/s. Enterprise SSDs will have up to 4 lanes of PCIe, which provides 4GB/s of bandwidth.
There was also some work on the software side that needed to be done to support PCIe devices, including NVM Express and SCSI Over PCIe (SOP), both of which are well underway.
If you are interested in knowing more about PCIe SSDs, keep an eye on our Education page, where, sometime during the week of August 5, we will be posting a new white paper on this topic.