When will we have PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe TLC 3D-VNAND drives?

[Ohmidon]

With all the SSD technology buzzing lately I've been looking for what I believe would be the current "best in class" SSD configuration and I'm a bit surprised to not see it anywhere, even on any roadmaps I could find. Even Samsung's newly updated 850 Pro and EVO are still SATA. If I understand what I've been reading lately then for the fastest IO we need PCIe 3.0 x4 for the best bandwidth with NVMe for the controller. In addition Samsung's new TLC memory is purported to have significantly greater endurance than it's predecessors, which interests me greatly but to which I have yet to see any concrete testing done. And lastly the 3D NAND designs obviously reduce cost per GB and possibly heat concerns. I know technology is constantly evolving but if and when I do buy something I want it to be good enough that I'm happy with it for years and not upset by newly released technology (my own problem obviously but if I'm willing to spend the money, who cares?). My questions then are these...

1) Am I wrong on any point in thinking that a PCI Express 3.0 4 channel NVMe TLC 3D-VNAND drive would have no peers? Ideally I want to see one of these drives on an M.2 or U.2 form factor (given capacity restraints obviously). If I'm correct, can anyone speculate on why I haven't seen one? Why would Samsung be flooding the market with MLC NAND in the 3D architecture and why still release new flagship drives in the SATA interface? Are we just talking the consumer market and it's odd fluctuations here?

2) Has anyone seen or heard anything about the endurance and heat attributes of any of the new 3D NAND architecture's out there? It seems to me that with lower densities we can expect greater heat tolerance but I haven't seen anything one way or the other yet...

What does the community think? Can someone set me straight?

 

[drtweak]

1) Because SATA is still the dominate connector for storage and it will be for a long time to some still. I mean there still make motherboards with IDE Controllers on them! I haven't see a PC that ships with a IDE hard drive in 10 years. I'm assuming they still keep them for DVD Drive. There is SATA Express but that is still yet to have any real drives yet and then also they don't really need PCIe 3.0 as the 2.0 bandwidth still isn't maxed out on these guys yet. Right now NVMe is more on the commercial/Enterprise side of things still. For every day people needing those kind of speeds isn't needed on the consumer base right now. I mean who needs more than 550 MBps? That is a gigabyte for every two seconds. Who needs that kind of bandwidth? Even for people who do Video Editing/3D Rendering etc it is more about CPU speed and RAM than Hard drive speed.

Except for the people who want to press the power button and be able to click and use their PC in 10 seconds or less the need of a faster SSD/SATA Port for consumers isn't needed right now. On the Enterprise side though with servers that run calculations, databases, email, etc to hundreds if not thousands of people as the same exact time then yes you pay top dollar for the fastest stuff around.

And for 2 got nothing on that.