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The future of SSD's

T

TonyB

Senior member
Read Anand's article on the Intel mSATA 525 SSD and was amazed on how small the drive is compared to a traditional 2.5" ssd. I thought it'll be fun to try to predict what the storage landscape will be 5 years from now. The current trend now seems to be miniaturization, solving bottlenecks, reduce power consumption. Would it be too far fetched to assume that in the near future, we'll start to see the SSD controller integrated into the CPU itself and connect SSD storage space directly to the motherboard similar to how we attach RAM today? What would be the advantages/disadvantages of having the SSD controller in the CPU? lower costs. eliminate bottlenecks. reduced upgradability?
 
I don't think we will see that, at least anytime soon. What has been integrated into the CPU in the past are functions that were first integrated into motherboards, then in motherboard chipsets, then to the CPU.
 
While an on-chip controller might be a stretch, I could see an mSATA slot ala laptop placed on a desktop board near the SATA headers as an easily doable feature. I saw an article on RAM sticks that had an SSD drive built in that was powered by the mobo but connected via a conventional SATA cable, an interesting concept that (I guess) never took off.
 
Mushkin has released a 480GB mSATA drive. The future in the near term, will see more of these, especially in ultrabooks and tablets. As OEMs develop such items, they have not agreed to a standard controller, so the liklihood of that in the CPU is much farther down the road.
 
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Why even have mSATA at this point? Just plug the drives directly onto PCIe. It would reduce latency even more. I don't think controllers will be built onto the CPU because that would greatly limit innovation in flash configurations and provide no significant boost. We'll probably be seeing bigger dram caches on the drives. Some of the drives don't even have a dram cache. We'll see even higher speeds no doubt. Also they'll probably be moving to resistive memory in the future.
 
5 years from now is tough one to predict. Since SSD are are about as fast as they will get, I see sizes increasing and pricing coming down. And lifespans shortening.

I so like the idea of mSATA right on the mobo. I don't think it's going to happen though.
 
Maybe someday SSD's will be plugged in like a memory card is to a reader today, and the same size as one too. Have like 4 or 6 slot's to plug them in...
 
zephyrprime said:
Why even have mSATA at this point? Just plug the drives directly onto PCIe. It would reduce latency even more. I don't think controllers will be built onto the CPU because that would greatly limit innovation in flash configurations and provide no significant boost. We'll probably be seeing bigger dram caches on the drives. Some of the drives don't even have a dram cache. We'll see even higher speeds no doubt. Also they'll probably be moving to resistive memory in the future.
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I agree, though doesn't BIOS need to adapt to make this better? There are SSDs that plug into PCIe now, but on bootup they take several seconds to initialize due to the way PCIe is handled, like how RAID cards take extra time.

What I would like to see is a PCIe card that comes with 32 chip sockets, of which only 1 is filled with 256GB of SSD memory. You can then buy chips when you need more storage and plug them in to expand your drive up to 8TB.
 
You guys may be pleased to hear PCI-express is going to be the new trend, where the controller is integrated in the storage device itself according to IDE philosophy. The result is 'SATA Express' which is more or less the same as PCI express making use of SATA cabling and allowing to be backwards compatible.

The real breakthrough here is that future storage devices will contain their own controller and attach directly to PCI-express without 'SATA' controller overhead in between.
 
Rasterman said:
What I would like to see is a PCIe card that comes with 32 chip sockets, of which only 1 is filled with 256GB of SSD memory. You can then buy chips when you need more storage and plug them in to expand your drive up to 8TB.
Click to expand...
That would be a nightmare for the controller logic. Wear leveling would have to be recorded for each NAND bank.

What we need is NAND that don't degrade, then they can do that easily.
 
ShintaiDK said:
Crucial will also release up to 960GB mSATA SSDs with their new M500 series.
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mSATA will only be up to 480GB. There's room for 4 NAND packages and with 16GB die, the maximum package size is 128GB.

Rasterman said:
What I would like to see is a PCIe card that comes with 32 chip sockets, of which only 1 is filled with 256GB of SSD memory. You can then buy chips when you need more storage and plug them in to expand your drive up to 8TB.
Click to expand...

There are already PCIe SSDs that have mSATA slots in them. Essentially it's nothing more than a RAID controller but it's the closest you can get (at least right now).

MrX8503 said:
Why is m.2 superior to msata? Is it smaller? Looking at photos, they're both really small.
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M.2 won't be limited to just one physical size. The problem with mSATA is the limit of only 4 NAND packages, which has an impact on performance.
 
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