Items tagged with PCI Express
The PCI standards group PCI-SIG (Special Interest Group) comprised of AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and other technology bigwigs announced it has finalized the specifications for the PCI Express 4.0 standard. It has previously announced in June at the group's DevCon event that the spec was feature complete and undergoing review. Now several months later PCI Express 4.0 is finalized, and fast. PCIe 4.0 offers a transfer rate of 16GT/s with flexible lane width configurations. That is double the raw bitrate of PCIe 3.0 and more than triple the bitrate of PCIe 2.0. In full duplex mode, that translates to around 64GB/s of bi-direction x16 bandwidth, whereas PCIe 3.0 topped out at around 32GB/s, and PCIe 2.0...
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PCI-SIG, the consortium that is in charge of developing and maintaining the PCI Express standard, announced a couple of developments this week. One is the official launch of the PCIe 4.0 specification that will take the baton from PCIe 3.0, and the other is early work on the standards eventual replacement, PCIe 5.0. Starting with the former, PCIe 4.0 supports 16 gigatransfers per second (GT/s). With 16Gb/s of link bandwidth, PCIe 4.0 offers peak bandwidth of 64GB/s per 16-lane slot, effectively doubling the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 while also maintaining backwards compatibility. In addition, the updated spec introduces flexible lane width configurations and lower power operation. "I’m pleased to...
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It’s a given that SSDs have pretty much taken over the high performance and ultra-slim laptop markets, and are even making some inroads in the desktop sector. While most consumer SSDs up to this point have been SATA-based, PCI Express-based SSDs are gaining traction and significant speed increases. When it comes to outright speed, NVMe PCIe SSDs are hard to beat, and Samsung has a real whopper with its new SM951-NVMe SSD. The SM951 is the industry’s first NVMe SSD to use an M.2 form-factor and its performance is quite astonishing. Samsung says that the SM951-NVMe is capable of sequential read and write speeds of 2,260 MB/sec and 1,600 MB/sec respectively. Comparable SATA-based M.2 SSDs typically...
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Last year, Plextor introduced its M6e family of solid state drives. The drives are / were offered in M.2 and PCI Express flavors, though technically the PCIe-based models were the same M.2 drives parked in a PCIe-to-M.2 adapter card. Regardless of the technicalities involved, the Plextor M6e’s specifications and performance were relatively strong, with peak read speeds topping the 770MB/s mark.The original Plextor M6e, however, wasn’t much to look at. It featured a basic, green PCB and the M.2 SSD sat right in the middle for all to see. Plextor decided to kick things up a few notches with a new revision of the M6e, dubbed the Black Edition. The upcoming Plextor M6e Black Edition is similar to...
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We have already looked at a number of PCI Express based drives, with wide ranging price points and performance levels. Some of the drives use proprietary technologies, while others are simply SATA RAID configurations, bridged to PCI Express. Intel, however, recently released a whole new family of PCI Express solid state drives, the SSD DC P3x00, featuring an NVMe controller. NVMe is a low-latency, scalable host controller interface designed specifically for PCI Express-based solid state drives. NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) offers a number enhancements over legacy interfaces, like support for parallel operations and support for up to 64K commands within a single I/O queue to the drive. NVMe...
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The pace of innovation on in the solid state storage market hasn’t slowed a bit in the last few years. Numerous manufacturers continue to release newer, faster SSDs at regular, frequent intervals. There’s been an underlining limitation, however, that’s prevented monumental leaps in performance—the aging SATA interface. Current SATA implementations simply don’t offer the bandwidth necessary to keep pace with the continuous innovation happening in solid state storage. As such, more and more manufactures have been looking to higher bandwidth interfaces like PCI Express. We have already looked at a number of PCI Express based drives, with wide ranging price points and...
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Just before the mid-range AMD Radeon HD 7790 hit store shelves in early April, NVIDIA countered with the GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST. NVIDIA’s move also involved pricing changes that were good for mid-range card shoppers, but what matters most is that the card NVIDIA managed to launch coincident with the Radeon HD 7790’s launch, offers better performance in most of our benchmarks. With the dust settling, all that’s left now is for the factory-overclocked cards to battle it out. Asus and Sapphire have already taken a crack with their overclocked Radeon HD 7790s. Those cards definitely out-perform the stock-clocked Radeon HD 7790 we tested in March, but couldn’t always overcome...
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Just before the mid-range AMD Radeon HD 7790 hit store shelves in early April, NVIDIA countered with the GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST. NVIDIA’s move also involved pricing changes that were good for mid-range card shoppers, but what matters most is that the card NVIDIA managed to launch coincident with the Radeon HD 7790’s launch, offers better performance in most of our benchmarks. With the dust settling, all that’s left now is for the factory-overclocked cards to battle it out. Asus and Sapphire have already taken a crack with their overclocked Radeon HD 7790s. Those cards definitely out-perform the stock-clocked Radeon HD 7790 we tested in March, but couldn’t always overcome...
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When it comes to solid state storage, or just about any type of storage technology for that matter, there are two things you can never get enough of -- capacity and speed. SATA-based Solid State Drives offer a good balance of both currently, as NAND Flash density continues to scale, but they can't compete with PCI Express-based SSDs, when it comes to raw bandwidth. PCI-Express SSD cards offer "direct attached" storage on a native PCIe system interface, without the need for translation to and from the SATA (Serial ATA) interface. As a result, bandwidth bottlenecks are alleviated and transfer times for both sequential and random workloads are generally much faster. Of course PCIe...
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OCZ used the Consumer Electronics Show to unveil their latest high-end solid state drive, the Vector PCI Express. As its name suggests, the Vector PCI Express leverages the same in-house developed Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller technology used in OCZ’s excellent Vector SATA III SSD (reviewed here), but the new drive attaches to a system via PCI Express. We posted news of OCZ’s initial announcement here, but have since been able to check it out in person and witness a few benchmark runs. A quick visual inspection of the OCZ Vector PCI Express reveals a pair of Barefoot 3 controllers on board, along with a boatload Intel NAND and Micron SDRAM cache. There is also a removable...
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Most of the PCIe SSD cards on the market today, with the exception of products from Fusion-io, still rely on SATA or SAS-based NAND controllers to interface on the backend of the device to the NAND array. PCIe cards from OCZ, Intel, LSI and others use controllers from LSI SandForce or the like. Fusion-io was the first company to introduce a true native PCI Express to NAND processor employed in their products, though Micron has also been cooking up their own native PCIe SSD technology for some time now. Today we're looking at the Micron P320h, a PCI Express SSD that was introduced to the market well over a year ago and has actually been shipping to OEM customers for some time, but is just...
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We've often spoken about the future of SSD technology eventually evolving away from "bridged" interfaces like SATA and SAS, to direct-attached, native interfaces like PCI Express. It just makes sense. With the ultra-fast random access times and high IO bandwidth of solid state storage, it's not the storage media itself that's the limiting factor, rather, non-native interfaces get in the way and become the bottleneck. A SAS or SATA controller still has to have its protocol translated over to PCIe so the host can talk to it, which wastes precious bandwidth and adds latency. Most of the PCIe SSD cards on the market today, with the exception of products from Fusion-io,...
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Super Talent this week unveiled a new extreme solid state drive (SSD) solution that skips SATA III in favor of PCI Express. It's the new RAIDDrive upStream, a new type of SSD designed to take advantage of the greater bandwidth PCIe affords with up to 1GB/s of read performance and up to 900MB/s of write performance, compared to 550MB/s for SATA III solutions. "The upStream is a perfect addition to any workstation running a variety of disk intensive applications," Super Talent says. "It’s perfect for Animation, Simulation, CAD and Sorting & Searching large databases. When time is money, upStream quickly pays for itself and in the hands of creative professionals, upStream facilitates the...
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Over the last few months, we have taken a look at a couple of OCZ-built products that leverage the company’s SuperScale Storage Accelerator with VCA (Virtualized Controller Architecture) 2.0. The first product to arrive was the RevoDrive 3 X2, which is a high-end, PCI Express SSD targeted at ultra-enthusiasts and workstation customers. Then came the extreme OCZ Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSD, which caters to the enterprise. The latest OCZ product to hit the lab, the RevoDrive Hybrid also shares these traits, but its flash memory is paired to a 1TB traditional hard drive. With the RevoDrive Hybrid, the device’s flash memory is meant to be used as cache for the most frequently accessed data on...
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Over the last few months, we have taken a look at a couple of OCZ-built products that leverage the company’s SuperScale Storage Accelerator with VCA (Virtualized Controller Architecture) 2.0. The first product to arrive was the RevoDrive 3 X2, which is a high-end, PCI Express SSD targeted at ultra-enthusiasts and workstation customers. Then came the extreme OCZ Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSD, which caters to the enterprise. If you’d like to learn more about the technology behind VCA 2.0 and OCZ’s Superscale Storage Accelerator, we strongly suggest perusing those two articles. While they’re designed for completely different target markets, the OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 and Z-Drive...
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Today, OCZ is letting fly with the second coming of a VCA 2.0 product, this time squarely targeting the enterprise, datacenter and high-end workstation markets. Where OCZ's RevoDrive line targets more consumer-like price points, their Z-Drive line is about no holds barred performance for the enterprise. The Z-Drive R4 with VCA 2.0, the same SuperScale Storage Accelerator, and now an octet of SandForce SF-2200 controllers, has landed on our testbeds for a few cycles of the benchmark gauntlet. And oh yeah, it's packing a full 1.6TB (that's Terabytes) of usable capacity on board. As the old saying goes, let the games begin! OCZ Z-Drive R4 Performance Preview ...
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A few months back, OCZ took the wraps of their RevoDrive 3 product line. The RevoDrive 3 was the first product to make use of what OCZ calls their SuperScale Storage Accelerator processor with VCA 2.0, or Virtualized Controller Architecture. In short, coupled with a quartet of SandForce SF-2200 series SSD controllers, OCZ's VCA technology really turns up the juice on their new PCI Express-based SSD solutions; so much so that this "prosumer" or performance workstation class product actually leaves far more expensive enterprise class PCIe SSDs in the dust. Today, OCZ is letting fly with the second coming of a VCA 2.0 product, this time squarely targeting the enterprise, datacenter and...
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The Serial ATA International Organization (let's just call them SATA-IO for short) announced this week it's developing a new standard called SATA Express. This is exactly what it sounds like, in that the new specification takes the Serial ATA standard and PCI Express, tosses them into a high-tech blender, and what comes out is a faster interface for SATA devices called SATA Express. Doesn't that sound groovy? It should, because this technology sidesteps the SATA bottleneck that could come into play as solid state drives continue to get faster. According to SATA IO, the new spec is a cost friendly way of increasing device interface speeds to 8Gb/s and 16Gb/s. "SATA Express enables the development...
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BIOS updates are flowing over at Gigabyte, as the motherboard maker announced support for Intel’s 22nm Ivy Bridge chips and PCI Express 3.0 in its 6-series motherboards. The company is looking to stay current on support for the latest technologies and apparently didn’t want to wait to put out a new line of boards before rolling out some upgrades to its customers. The BIOS update is available for 6-series boards--almost four dozen of them, actually, all running the Z68, P67/H67, or H61 chipsets. Usually, BIOS updates are a bit of a snore, but this one is a doozy in that it delivers support for two exciting new technologies in one stroke, without requiring users to buy a new motherboard....
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If you've been reading the pages of HotHardware for any length of time, you've probably noticed that we have an affinity for just about anything SSD related. As performance enthusiasts at heart, it's no wonder why we're keenly focused on the market segment, but even so, there are standout products that tend to pique our interest more than others. And in the burgeoning SSD market, there's nothing more interesting than PCI Express based SSDs. In recent months we've covered PCI Express-based SSDs from virtually all the major players, from Fusion-io to, OCZ and LSI. The last time we took a look at OCZ's offering, the RevoDrive X2 took to the test bench and with its MLC-based...
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In recent months we've covered PCI Express-based SSDs from virtually all the major players, from Fusion-io to, OCZ and LSI. The last time we took a look at OCZ's offering, the RevoDrive X2 took to the test bench for us and with its MLC-based design, offered much of the performance of significantly more expensive SLC-based PCI Express SSDs, but at a fraction of the cost. Today the third coming of the RevoDrive from OCZ is upon us, with all new technology on board, from its Flash controllers to the RAID processor. With read/write specs that will make you drool, the RevoDrive 3 X2 is here and if it lives up to its specifications on paper, we think you're going to want to stick...
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If we consider companies like LSI and their competitors, like Adaptec and AMCC (3Ware), you'll note that they're in a unique position in this storage technology migration, in that they can almost take an agnostic stance, in terms of which media type and market opportunity they decide to resource development efforts in. For players like LSI, with a wealth of HBA controller IP at their disposal, they can relatively easily adapt and re-tool their technologies to service NAND Flash SSD memory structures and bring compelling solutions to market as market demand develops. The LSI WarpDrive that we have on hand for you here is representative of LSI's efforts to capitalize on the company's strong...
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