The limitations of SSDs?

JoshBrowne

JoshBrowne

JoshBrowne

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Is this drive SATA-III?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-064-OC&groupid=1657&catid=1660&subcat=1669

It doesn't say either way... hmmmm...

I guess it has to be to get that speed right?

Or is it read through the PCI lane? If so, why are SSDs going this way (the RevoDrive does the same thing) rather than being just like normal HDDs that link to the mobo via SATA-III connections?

Are SSDs limited to the 350mb/s sort of speed unless they feature built in RAID controllers?

And could you use two of these drives and RAID them again to get read/write speeds of 1.4gb/s?

Thanks. Sorry for all the crazy questions.
 
No its not SATA III its HSDL (High Speed DataLink). You connect it to a PCI-E slot - one of the reviewers said they put it in their PCI-e x 16 slot.
 
Well SATA-III has a theoretical maximum throughput of 750MB/s (6/8*1000) whereas even a PCI-e x 1 slot has a maximum theoretical throughput of 1GB/s or 8Gb/s (so 33% quicker that SATA-III). A PCI-e x 16 slot has a maximum theoretical throughput of 128Gb/s or 16GB/s (which is about 21 times as quick as SATA-III).

I think my maths is correct.
 
pepp77 said:
Well SATA-III has a theoretical maximum throughput of 750MB/s (6/8*1000) whereas even a PCI-e x 1 slot has a maximum theoretical throughput of 1GB/s or 8Gb/s (so 33% quicker that SATA-III). A PCI-e x 16 slot has a maximum theoretical throughput of 128Gb/s or 16GB/s (which is about 21 times as quick as SATA-III).

I think my maths is correct.
Click to expand...


AWWWHHHH! That makes sense! So they've essentially gone down the route which is more future proof - I understand now - makes sense to go for HSDL when they've already reached the boundaries of SATA-III!

Thank you for your explination! Pretty much perfect! Points to you sir hehe!

But does anyone know if you can RAID these bad boys? Forgive me if I'm wrong but aren't the raid controllers on mobo designed specifically for the SATA connections? OR do you think these drives could end up being made so that you can RAID them with something that resembles an SLI/Xfire connection?
 
Actually PCI-E is currently in revision 2.0, so you get 4 Gbps per PCI-E lane. Thus, a 4x PCI-E SSD has up to 16 Gbps to work with, which is obviously more than 6 Gbps SATA provides. No cards can currently saturate 6 Gbps SATA though, as far as I'm aware.
 
err, pci-e 2.0 is 5.0 Gbps, pci-e 1.1 is 2.5Gbps.
There are drives that can saturate sata 6Gbps speed, like the one linked in the OP, hence them being on HSDL so they dont get bottlenecked.
There are plenty of RAID controllers that saturate a PCI-E 1x lane, hence why when they are supporting more than 2 drives they move over to a 4x link, and 8x link when they get more drives than that (these are sata 3Gbps cards).

The crucial C300 saturates a Sata 3Gbps link by itself (read) so would also saturate a PCI-E 1.1 lane by itself, not a PCI-E 2.0 lane though.
 
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