Solid State Drives: SATA vs. PCI Express

[Pernsworth]

I've just recently developed a keen interest in SSD's. To give some indication of where I am at on my learning curve, I understand that the recent "breakthrough" with the BareFoot Controller has solved the problem of "stuttering" that has been plaguing the SSD industry, and now their performance is sufficiently high enough such that people will start to buy them despite a dramatic difference in cost (per Gigabyte) compared to standard (mechanical) HD's.

15 second boot times for XP is more than enough to justify a 300% upcharge for me, and I was ready to buy the SUPER TALENT UltraDrive ME FTM32GX25H 2.5" 32GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail for $ 128.00. Figured I could use it as my system disk, and access my stored data on another drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820609392

But the other day I read an article that seemed to denigrate the whole idea of SATA SSD's, because (someone claimed) that the data transfer speeds of SATA SSD's are somewhere on the order of 120 Mbs read & write, the PCI Express SSD's were running almost 5 X that speed.

500 Mbs read & write speeds ? Is this a realistic number ?

So now I'm re-thinking the whole thing. Maybe it's better to wait for PCI SSD's to come out. Those that have at NewEgg currently are actually SLOWER than the SATA SSD's, so I don't understand that.

Where is the technology going, and how long will it take to get there ?

Will PCI SSD prices be on-par with SATA, or will there always be a signficant difference. And if so, why ?

Also, does it matter if it's PCI express X16 or PCI Express X1 ? I don't really understand the difference between the two.

How does this difference affect SSD performance?

Is SATA going to be a think of the past, and will motherboards come with more PCI slots in the future ?

Any links to any relevant articles will be much appreciated, & thanks in advance.

 

[Hacp]

Just stick with the SATA ssds. SATAII has a 300mbit/s limit, so you should be fine. What you're doing now is paying for performance. In two to three years, I'm sure SSDs will be 3x cheaper and 3x faster. However, if you keep waiting, you won't ever enjoy your product.

I think I'm also going to plunge into the SSD realm. I'm going with a low performance 128gb samsung one. 90 read/70 write but its cheaper and I'll still enjoy fast boot times . Its for my main computer, which also happens to be a laptop

 

[taltamir]

pci express based ones are not recognized as HDD by the bios, you cannot boot from them, and they are VERY expensive, they are for high end servers, not home users. stick to SATA.

And its bigfoot not barefoot... the intel controller is even better than the bigfoot one, but bigfoot drives are about half the price of intel's. Pretty much anything else on the market is not acceptable.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Dude, it is barefoot, not bigfoot.

http://www.dailytech.com/OCZ+V...lease/article14257.htm

 

[Idontcare]

So my take on the OP is this is a fishing expedition.

Someone has been tasked with identifying the perception barrier their company's potential pci-based SSD lineup may encounter and so they are approaching the forums with a "me is dumb, please edumacate me on why pci-sdd is evil or superior" online persona to generate this information ahead of time in a passive manner.

I applaud the effort, it was almost convincing but in the end the overall post was just too scripted to come across as authentic.

I hope you get the info you need to do your job, if not from this forum then from the others you or your team-members are currently foraging and harvesting from.

Please excuse me, it's seldom if ever that I get called to moderate in any technical forum outside of the Video zoo, but you seem a touch paranoid and a bit out there in your bald faced surmise that the OP is some sort of stealth marketer.

Unless you have more to go on, please confine your responses here to substantive answers to the specific technical questions that the OP asks, or I shall be forced to confiscate your entire supply of tinfoil.

If you have a problem with my response, please take it up in PFI or by pm to the mods or in an e-mail to the legendary Derek Wilson, who may or may not actually exist.

Perknose
Senior AT Mod

 

[Pernsworth]

I appreciate all of the fast responses, although the last one is pretty "out there".

The situation is exactly as I described. My particular form of OCD is such that I can't wait not 45 seconds for XP to load. I have a limited budget, and until I build the socket 775 with the E8400 on the uATX board I've been planning, I've got a few hundred I can throw into my current system.

Again, my focus centers on the perforance difference between SATA II and the PCI option.

The idea of using PCI slots is new to me, and so I don't know much about it.

Are these the PCI x16's or the PCI x1 slots ? My M/B has only one PCI x16 which is being used by the video, so how does that all work out ?

And is the performance difference as great as I've read ?

Seems to me that M/B manufacturers would be making their boards capable of booting via PCI. Is this being done ?

Also, I've not read much about the comparison between the Intel X-25 and the newest SSD's with the Barefoot controller. Has a review/round-up been done ?

If I remember right, the Intell SSD was not perfect, in addition to being much-more expensive.

Finally, the idea that a particular hardware technology is intended for "servers" does not mean there will not be demand for it by "home users". I'm one.

 

[usernamereserved]

There is no reason why a PC cant boot from PCIe, they already do this with hardware RAID cards.

The PCIe SSD that i have seen are all more or less all based on a HighPoint RR series x4 PCIe card so there is little reason why they cant boot from that arrangement

 

[lopri]

Originally posted by: Pernsworth
Is SATA going to be a think of the past, and will motherboards come with more PCI slots in the future ?

Not anytime soon, I suppose. We're short on PCI/PCIe slots for GPUs as it is.

 

[ilkhan]

Originally posted by: lopri

Originally posted by: Pernsworth
Is SATA going to be a think of the past, and will motherboards come with more PCI slots in the future ?

Not anytime soon, I suppose. We're short on PCI/PCIe slots for GPUs as it is.

This kind've amuses me, and the QPI bus itself is only fast enough for like 24 lanes IIRC. The 32 lanes of X58 is bottlenecked by the QPI bus (and even moreso on HTT).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...dwidths#Computer_buses
2x x16 20 buses is 16GB/s
QPI (6.4GT) is 12.8GB/s

 

[Yellowbeard]

IIRC, SATA will theoretically scale to 6Gbits/s so no, it will not be obsolete any time soon. Also, it will not matter if you connect your drives to the onboard SATA or to a RAID card via PCI-e. The limit will still be the SATA interface + RAID controller on the card even if the PCI-e interface has a higher theoretical transfer rate.

 

[Emulex]

i was thinking of using esata ports to cluster a few machines together.

too slow?

 

[Pernsworth]

Originally posted by: ilkhan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...dwidths#Computer_buses
2x x16 20 buses is 16GB/s
QPI (6.4GT) is 12.8GB/s

I re-read this thread about once per day, checking for new posts and seeing if more of these answer merge into some kind of understanding. Today I clicked the link about and was interested to see all the data transfer bandwidths posted against each other for comparitive purposes, which has provoked a new round of questions.

(How the chart was organized was VERY confusing. Is there some order behind it that I couldn't understand ? It seemed "thrown together" to me.)

First, I had been told by someone on another forum that the difference between PCIe and PCIe 2 was not really relevant to me when purchasing a new video card, yet it seems the bandwidth difference between the two is dramatic, so I am wondering how to percieve this.

Also, I gather that there are x1, x2, x4...x16 PCI's, yet it seems most motherboards will have only one x16 and maybe one x1.

Is this new Technology that has yet to be adopted/accepted ?

Seems to me that in terms of throughput and versatility, PCIe should have replaced just about everything (data storage, video, etc...)

Is there a link to a primer, etc... that will help me to learn more about PCIe ?

Where is this going ? What's "cutting edge" for PCIe ? Are there motherboards designed to take advantage of this ? Etc....

What is useful/necessary for me to know about this, and how do I get it, etc... ??

Thanks in advance.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: usernamereserved
There is no reason why a PC cant boot from PCIe, they already do this with hardware RAID cards.

The PCIe SSD that i have seen are all more or less all based on a HighPoint RR series x4 PCIe card so there is little reason why they cant boot from that arrangement

with the right "in between" chip that could be done... but it will complicate things and make them even more expensive. Plus it takes time to work out all the functions... sure, eventually we will probably see PCIe based SSD that are recognized as drives by the bios, but AFAIK none of the models have it...

Also, none of the models currently out are even REMOTELY close to the budget the OP is talking about.

 

[SRoode]

Originally posted by: Pernsworth
I have a limited budget, and until I build the socket 775 with the E8400 on the uATX board I've been planning, I've got a few hundred I can throw into my current system.

I have to agree with Idontcare on this one. Something does not smell right.

Until you build a system that is already outdated? You have a couple of hundred to spare? A couple of hundred ($168 for the CPU, $58 for the MB) will buy you a E8400 and an ASUS mATX MB. You will get a more noticeable improvement on doing that than anything else if you consider the 775 platform an upgrade. So, why not just do it now with the extra couple of hundred?

It's a heck of a lot cheaper than SSDs now performance to price ratio.

 

[SRoode]

Originally posted by: Pernsworth
The situation is exactly as I described. My particular form of OCD is such that I can't wait not 45 seconds for XP to load.

My desktop (Q6600, raptor drive) loads XP in about 15 seconds (No SSD).

My 4 year old LAPTOP (an old T2250 @ 1.73GHz) loads VISTA in about 25 seconds (No SSD).

Spend the couple of hundred on a new processor/MB.

 

[taltamir]

i was giving him the benefit of the doubt here and just assuming he has absolutely no idea about what hardware to buy. buy yes, SSD is the last thing he needs in a list of upgrades, especially if he has hundreds of dollars for it.

 

[Pernsworth]

Okay.

This is all so strange, examining my motives when asking about PCIe SSD's, how they compare to SATA and where the technology is headed.

Very, very ODD.

I'm half-tempted to take responsibility for the JFK assasination, and the mysterious "goings-on" at Area 51, but am concerned some people might take it seriously and this thread will lose what little focus it has.

Please just accept my questions, interests and motives are exactly as they have been stated. I came to Anandtech because I understand it and Tom's Hardware are the top sites for getting truly informed opinions. I've spent several years on other sites, am quite seasoned to the culture of forums and the diverse personalities that frequent them and how threads can sometimes go wrong, horribly wrong when certain personalities choose to send them into directions that are completely off-topic and counter-productive to the interests of the OP, which is me.

I appreciate the value of the time & expertise being offered, but please note I am completely aware that there is no monopoly on the subject, and I'd like to keep this thread open to serious participants with constructive opinions and knowledge to offer, and I'd rather not have this thread spiral-off into some weird direction for no other purpose than to satisfy the paranoid perceptions of bored participants. There's a door around here somewhere, and if my stated interests and questions are of no interest to you, I'd ask you to find it.

Also, I am not asking for advice on what I should do with my hardware money. It's not relevant, but the uATX/E8400 build is an idea for a special-purpose build that I have, with the intent to build a prototype for possible niche-marketing. I have an older Opteron 165 system that does what I need it to; if I build another computer it will not replace the one I am using.

Also, the suggestions for a better use of my money, while appreciated and well-intentioned, left-off the cost of the DDR2 memory, Power Supply and the custom-constructed, special-purpose case that is the heart of my idea. The suggestion also left-off the time involved in learning to build and configure an Intel system. I am familiar with AMD, and have never owned an Intel system before. Also, I am not interested in the speed advantages of the Raptor, due to what I understand to be both noise and reliability issues.

As I said before, I have a couple of hundred dollars I could spend to upgrade my current system, and while I may also purchase additional DDR memory, I am mostly concerned with my XP boot times.

Secondarily, my next build might incorporate an SSD, and so whatever learning I will need to do can be done "hands-on" on my current system.

I've been following the thread on the G. Skill PI series, and think this (or something similar) might be good to use in my next build. I may start a thread on that subject at some point in the future, but right now all I want from this thread is to broaden my understanding of SSD's from knowledgable people.

So, enough with the paranoid conspiracy theories.

Also, I dont' think the E8400 is "obsolete". I'm not convinced that the even Q6600 is worth the additional cost, given what I have read about how current software doesn't take advantage of even 2 cores, much less 4. I could be wrong, but then that is a discussion for another thread.

Finally, there's a bucket-full of questions regarding the topic that are still unanswered. If you know the answer, I'd appreciate it. And if you don't, perhaps you should wait patiently with me, instead of doing something else.

 

[taltamir]

stop insulting us... paranoid conspiracy theories? you didn't just have random questions out of curiosity, you professed to having an ancient outdated system and plenty of money for bleeding edge tech upgrade. And you were told that solid state is the last thing on the upgrade list; this is not a conspiracy theory.

If you want answers, try phrasing the questions clearly. Instead of a wall of text raving about imagined insults, just give a few bullet point questions.

 

[Pernsworth]

Again, I will reiterate. There is a door somewhere. If you do not share my interests or want to answer my clearly stated questions, please find it.

 

[taltamir]

Please stop posting in my thread. I know what you are, and what you are doing. I have been around for years and this is nothing new to me. I don't like you, and do not care to have you participate in my thread. Please stop, and find something else to do.

you know what I am? I am the ONLY one on "your thread" who did NOT accuse you of being a shill and gave you the benefit of the doubt.
But fine, I post to teach and learn and you obviously can contribute to neither.

 

[waggy]

wow after reading this i agree with i dontcare.


IF true then the OP should not be in a position to purchase anything since he does not want to listen to advice.

 

[coolVariable]

Originally posted by: waggy
wow after reading this i agree with i dontcare.