How long before mainstream SSD's exceed SATA3 ?

[techs]

I noticed that mainstream SSD's are now posting sustained transfer rates in excess of 500 MB/s. With the overhead of SATA3 some drives are even probably hitting the limit of the transfer rate.

Will SSD's soon be able to exceed SATA3 in the home market and are chipset and mobo manufacturers getting ready for to replace SATA3?

 

[rgallant]

just saying
2018 seems like a good bet based on your 4K 's @ 22mb and 62 mb
- unless you just transfer vid from one ssd to another for something to do.
-also you can double sata3[PER PORT] by raid 0 ,triple it with x3 ssd's. [I had reads @ 450 on sata 2 when I had x58 ]

 

[razel]

Yes. The future is interesting. Two 2012 laptops (a mid level $550 Dell and a low level $400 Acer) I've worked on have mSATA ports. mSATA looks like a mini PCI-E slot, meaning empty generic mini PCI-E slots in laptops will be easy to implement. PCI-E straight to the NAND controller has already been played around with and is the simplest path. However SATA doesn't want to go away. SATA is interested in becoming the software protocol (SATA Express) that runs in that PCI-E to NAND controller environment. This would make life very easy for SSD firmware writers. Just follow SATA's rules instead of trying to creating your own.

The only thing holding back direct PCI-E to NAND controller is being able to boot. UEFI is smart enough for this and luckily UEFI BIOS been pretty common in laptops, workstations and enthusiast motherboards since at least 2008.

 

[tweakboy]

Are you talking SATA 4.0 ?

That will be 3 or 4 years away at least.

 

[Boomhowler]

ocz has announced a thunderbolt drive which should be used without the sata interface

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5321/oczs-portable-thunderbolt-ssd-lightfoot

that should be able to get about 8Gbps sustained reads, almost double that of sata3-drives. Thunderbolt is basically pci over a cable, why should we want another similar interface?

 

[Makaveli]

I noticed that mainstream SSD's are now posting sustained transfer rates in excess of 500 MB/s.

This is only for Sustained transfer rates which the OEM's like to shake in your face with all the benchmarks.

Random performance and everything else is not even close.

 

[hhhd1]

Is there even a physical limitation for SATA on random data transfer ?
I do not think there is, with DMA and all that.

 

[Rubycon]

SAS 12Gbps but a direct path connect is needed particularly to take advantage of striped arrays. Next bottleneck is PCI-E 3.0.