UFS And NVMe Go Toe-To-Toe In Mobile, Toshiba Launches 3D BiCS NVMe SSDs

[Guest]

Toshiba announced that it will have its new BG series of products at the Flash Memory Summit 2016 next week. These new NVMe SSDs come in the smallest of form factors, such as small M.2 2230 (22x30mm) and BGA (Ball Grid Array) form factors.

UFS And NVMe Go Toe-To-Toe In Mobile, Toshiba Launches 3D BiCS NVMe SSDs : Read more

 

[Guest]

I'm still looking for the cable interface that will replace SATA3. M.2 looks great on paper, but you are limited to 1-2 per motherboard. I need minimum of three drives per computer (dual redundancy). All these new technologies look great, but it's too much of a mess to upgrade.

 

[PaulAlcorn]

[quotemsg=18392157,0,723938]I'm still looking for the cable interface that will replace SATA3. M.2 looks great on paper, but you are limited to 1-2 per motherboard. I need minimum of three drives per computer (dual redundancy). All these new technologies look great, but it's too much of a mess to upgrade.[/quotemsg]

Finding a decent cabled solution is dicey, too. The SATA committee has stated there will be no new (faster) SATA spec, so 3 is it.
SATA Express was DOA, there are no SSDs, though you can find a bunch of ill-advised motherboards that have ports for it.
U.2 was not DOA, but it is dead now pretty much for usual consumer stuff, though it is growing fast in the enterprise. There is still only one client-centric U.2 SSD (Intel 750), but it is overpriced and the cabling is ugly, at best. Perhaps they will come out with the OcuLink cables, which are the "planned" slim U.2 cables, but I wouldn't hold my breath. There are RAID controllers for NVMe coming soon, but unless vendors make more consumer U.2 SSDs it will not help.

 

[rhysiam]

[quotemsg=18392157,0,723938]I'm still looking for the cable interface that will replace SATA3. M.2 looks great on paper, but you are limited to 1-2 per motherboard. I need minimum of three drives per computer (dual redundancy). All these new technologies look great, but it's too much of a mess to upgrade.[/quotemsg]

There are already boards with 3 M.2 slots for ultra high speed storage, like this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157649&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-PCPartPicker,%20LLC-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID=

You can also chuck them in relatively cheap passive PCIe cards too. So with some careful hardware selection it's possible to get 4 or 5 at least without having to spend significant amounts of money.

There are x16 PCIe cards with 4xM.2 slots on them starting to appear (like this), but at present they require a PLX switch to address 4 separate x4 devices on the one x16 slot.. That's fairly niche at this stage, though so is requiring 6 + m.2 slots.

 

[glorfendel]

The issue with more M.2 or U.2 ports is pci lanes consumer gear has too few for and to slow to support 12 ports at 12 gbps or faster much less 10 m.2 ports. Once pcie 4 starts making it on to main boards this problem goes away. But with the density of SSDs going up so fast I would not expect to see more then 6 to 8 connections. any more would be reserved for servers and storage appliances. but at the rate things are going external connections will rival internal in a year or 2 anyway.

 

[tiagoluz8]

And there's also 3D XPoint which brings storage closer to RAM speeds. I'd love to see a motherboard with RAM-like slots for 3D Xpoint storage (4x SO-DIMM sized, right under the CPU, above the first PCI-E slot).