|
|
The great attraction of
PCIe for SSD oems is that it can support a wide range of performance
options with throughput upto 16GB/s, and much lower attachment costs than the
alternatives.
The older busses like PCI and cPCI also provide
performance which is adequate for many applications.
Bus connected SSDs
have been around since the earliest days of the SSD market.
The advantage
of this approach is high throughput and low latency compared to SSDs connected
via traditional hard disk style interfaces like
SAS,
SATA,
fibre-channel or
InfiniBand.
But
there are disadvantages too which include:-
1 - Bus style
interfaces reduce the available market for the SSD oem. Because older servers
may not have the interface, or perhaps the interface (for example Sun's SBus) is
proprietary and is only available in a small range of models.
2 - Bus
interfaces tend to have shorter permissable cable lengths - which restrict how
such SSDs can be connected.
3 - Bus interfaces usually don't include
intrinsic end to end error detection and correction. If the physical arrangement
of the SSD pushes the speed and cable lengths too far - then errors can arise in
the bus connect - which have to be dealt with in the associated driver. | |
| . |
 |
| . |
| PCIe,
PCI etc Extracts from
SSD History |
May 2008
STEC launched a PCIe mini
card form SSD with 32GB capacity and 55MBps / 25MBps R/W speeds.
April 2008
STORAGEsearch.com
published a new separate directory of
PCIe, PCI & cPCI SSDs
March 2008
Fusion-io announced it
had secured $19 million funding for its ioDrive - a PCIe compatible flash
SSD.
November 2007
SanDisk launched a PCIe
compatible 16G flash SSD.
October 2007
Addonics Technologies
launched what it called a "low cost large capacity SSD" platform. It's
a PCI card that can be installed with 4 Compact Flash cards with inbuilt
RAID support.
August 2007
Targa Systems launched a
64G 3U CompactPCI flash SSD with USB interface.
Violin Memory launched
world's fastest 2U SSD - with a PCIe interface. | |
| . |
 | |
