Why SATA Revision 3? Ask the SSDs!
Posted 08/20/08 at 10:39:32 PM | by Mark Edward Soper
Monday, we told you about the forthcoming SATA Revision 3.0, also known as SATA 6Gb/s. Given the fact that conventional hard disks still don't saturate the original SATA 1.5Gb/s bus, let alone the mainstream SATA Revision 2.0 3Gb/s bus, why bother with another speedup?
In a word: SSDs. The Inquirer reports that the new Intel solid-state drives introduced this week at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) come very close to saturating the SATA 3Gb/s bus with 250MB/s read speed, while blowing the doors off conventional hard disks and third-party SSDs. And, they're not alone. As we reported Monday, Indilinx isn't far behind, offering the 230MB/s Barefoot SSD drive controller.
So, what makes some SSD drives faster (or slower) than others? SSD drive performance is affected by two factors: the speed of the controller and the speed of the SSD memory chips. Currently, the fastest SSD drives use single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash, while drives using multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash trade higher capacity for slightly slower performance. As capacities climb and performance zooms, it's going to be an interesting fall and winter in the SSD business. Click here for more of our coverage of SSD technology and products.
That's the good news. The Inquirer also reports that the SATA-IO's Power over eSATA initiative, announced in January, is now expected to be released in early 2009 (rather than late this year as was originally expected). Power over eSATA will enable eSATA drives to pull their power from the eSATA port, just as many USB drives get their power from the USB port. Whenever Power over eSATA appears (and let's hope they come up with a cooler acronym than the logical "PoeSATA"), it will be very helpful in getting eSATA to become mainstream.
Illustration courtesy The Inquirer.
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Speed ratings for SATA?
Submitted by Scapegoat on Thu, 2008-08-21 09:35
I'm sorry, I've never really understood the speed ratings of SATA, but if they're marked as being good for speeds up to 1.5Gb/s and 3Gb/s, how is 250mb/s saturating even the original SATA?
Pretty soon....we will be
Submitted by gatorXXX on Thu, 2008-08-21 02:49
Pretty soon....we will be able to buy INTEL aftershave or INTEL corn removers at new egg with free shipping!! WOOHOO!!! I realize intel puts out good cpu's, MB's, etc....but come on folks, get a grip and a slurpee...other vendors are NOT that much slower, and just as good as intels offerings. You keep supporting intel like you do, our choices will be only intel then they will be able to charge what ever they want for their products.
Want to pay 600 bucks for an intel board that in all reality would cost 150 today? It's heading that way. Intel stuff is really no better than anyone elses products. Sure, you get a little better performance according to synthetic benchmarks but hell, intel prolly had a hand in making them too so they favor intel.
Regardless....intel is like cadillac....a great car but no better than alot of others....plus you pay 30% more for the name.
why stop with ESATA? Why not
Submitted by Keith E. Whisman on Wed, 2008-08-20 23:37
why stop with ESATA? Why not make an internal SATA standard that powers hdd's or ssd's over the SATA cable? Seems like it would help to reduce the clutter in the case. Perhaps all the powered SATA cables could connect to a riser card off the motherboard that also has a connector for a power wire from the PSU. With a riser card you could have alot of connectors with a very small foot print. Thus leaving more room on the mother board for other components. It's been done in the past. I remember the IDE controller card that plugged into a Vesa Local Bus. These cards were long but here it would just be the power supply and the SATA ports would be on the card and the components would be on the motherboard. This would be freaking fantastic.. I should get into the motherboard design field.
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