SATA to move to PCI Express
New standard will support 2 ports at 8 Gbps each
Sep 13, 2011 in Chips, Desktop
While 6 Gbps is still plenty enough for rotating media we are getting close to running out of steam for SSDs that use the SATA interface.
Therefore the SATA0-IO has started working on the next generation specification called SATA Express.
SATA Express basically uses the OCI Express physical interface and allows for 2 ports running at 8 Gbps each using PCI Express 3.0 according to Marc Noblitt, Director, SATA-IO Board of Directors.
This is what the SATA Express connector will look like, Illustration courtesy of SATA-IO.
The connector group is still working on the exact design of the connectors, but in the future we will have a common interface for PCI Express and SATA on the motherboards and it will be possible to use the connectors for either device.
SATA-IO was originally looking t moving to 12 Gbps on their own, but decided that it would be better for everybody if they joined forces with PCI Express and leveraged an already existing physical interface.S|A
“An x2, an x1″ surely – grammar these days, sigh. :)
The bad side? we return to long, flat cables.
I was thinking that we were evolving to a cleaner cabling.
What are you talking about? It uses the same SATA cables (hence it being called “SATA”). The slot takes either 2 SATA cables or one PCIe card.
Presumably you could also plug a power cable to the power portion of that PCIe x2 connector, for external storage? Enough to feed a box of a half dozen platter drives… No mention of that though.
Qlaras gets biggee’ oriental carpet, fat legs, too.
what up witd DAT.
one bent legs, iFract.
white ones may be 2. maybe 7 ohmn res on -e3.0 bring good SSD.
drashek dd
Another option would be using two SATA-cables simultaneously for one device. That would be 12 Gbit/s in theory. SATA unfortunatly has only 4 wires for datatransfer which is now a bottleneck.
This is basically what we need in the future. I don’t think we can overextend the sata 6gbps connection to e.g. 9 or 12gbps. Copper wires aren’t fast enough now. Good work PIC-foundation!
what PIC Foundation? they take PIC’s?
“Marc Noblitt, Director, SATA-IO Board of Directors.”
uhmm PCI-E also uses copper wire…
Copper is plenty fast, depending on how far you’re running it.
I know you have to pay the bills, but I wish the ad’s didn’t have to cover the text and diagram.
If you’re using Opera just set Fit to Width on, Ctrl+F11, works for me.
Semi Accurate is very poor…
Using Chrome with AdBlock works just fine.
This is stupid. SATA == PCIe already.
Check what channels the SATA-600 is using currently. Intel SATA-600 is at ‘Shared PCI-Express x1-4′ from ‘SouthBridge’ already.
Yet again less lanes and less lanes already by Sandy/Ivy Bridge. :)
i think you are confusing a few things.
the south bridge is often connected to the north-bridge using 4 PCI-E lanes. and intel doesn’t have a sata 600 south-bridge yet, so they used a external chip and connected it to the south-bridge using 1-4 PCI-E lanes.
Isn’t that what they’re trying to do?
No, that’s not what they’re trying to do. They’re going to actually use PCIE as the electrical interface for SATA in the future. Right now, SATA has it’s own specifications and it’s translated to PCIE on the MB’s chips interconnects. The future motherboard chip interconnects will probably still be PCIE though.
This is really weird. I thought NVM Express was going to come at this from another direction.
@Qlaras
Same page layout on Opera 11.
At the edge of the board please, not under the x16 slot mofos
Very interesting – and potentially useful, IF some of the motherboard manufacturers build them right.
My desktops are usually gaming PCs, so I only use 1 x16 PCI-E slot, the remaining 3 (MicroATX) or 6 (ATX) are usually unused. This would allow for consolidation of connectors, resulting in a (marginally) cheaper and smaller space needed on the board.
Commentary on page layout: The picture gets overlaid with the right side stuff, so I can only see 2/3 of the image. Clicking on image makes it smaller, have to click AGAIN (2nd time) to just see the image.
Did this for Firefox 6, IE 9, and Chrome, on Win 7. (Tested on the latter two due to some Firefox extensions that may have messed with the layout)
yeah, fails on linux / firefox too.
Too bad they “don’t” read these comments.
Same here. I’m on a 1366×768 15.6″, what screen resolution are ya’ll at?
Works fine here on Chrome Win7 15.6″ 1366×768.
Ah, it’s fixed!
FF 6.0.2 on W7x64 works fine for me. Using screen res of 1920×1200
They fixed it. So they do actually read the comments.