News - ASUS motherboards to boast full SATA Express performance

[HEXUS]

SRIS BIOS development should mean read/write speeds of up to 745/809MB/s.

Read more.

[shaithis]

Interesting, seems these should be compatible with M.2 interfaces as well.

[cheesemp]

Second link to SATA Express take me through to some article on a Samsung camera...
(http://www.nextpowerup.com/news/8410...on-camera.html)

Looks like an interesting idea but hopefully a stop gap for the next SATA standard?

[watercooled]

This is the next SATA standard. Reasons why this direction for SATA was chosen is covered on the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA_Express

[mtyson]

link is fixed now

[The Hand]

I wonder if this(SATA Express) will show up on AMD platforms next year? Maybe with Excavator?

[cheesemp]

This is the next SATA standard. Reasons why this direction for SATA was chosen is covered on the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA_Express

Thanks for the link. The original link I clicked on wasn't working and I was too busy at the time to investigate further. Bit sad it is the new standard. Would have preferred something more compact (Looks like an old P-IDE cable!) and ideally using the existing connector as is. Hopefully SATA 4 will fix this....

[LSG501]

yeah the socket design is a bit on the weird side of things, it just takes up far too much space on a motherboard, meaning the odds are that most companies will use the 'shared' socket approach where you can use it for sata 3 or sata express.

Also if you think about it the speeds being mentioned by Asus are actually pretty poor when you consider you've basically got 2 sata 3 sockets (space wise if nothing else) being used together which could be closer to 1200MB/s based on current sata 3 drives in raid 0....

Now assuming the premium that the sata express drive will likely have it might end up being cheaper to put 2 sata 3 drives in raid 0 if you don't mind the risk of losing data or space in your case.

[kalniel]

There was an article about this a while back here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7843/t...ress-with-asus

There's no advantage over using PCI-E, and it'd just mean taking more PCI-E lanes away. So I'd just like to see more PCI-E SSDs.

[LSG501]

There was an article about this a while back here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7843/t...ress-with-asus

There's no advantage over using PCI-E, and it'd just mean taking more PCI-E lanes away. So I'd just like to see more PCI-E SSDs.

well considering that sata express is basically just a 'sata connection' for pci-e drives then that's kind of to be expected lol

I can see one advantage of it though... you can in theory fit the sata express sockets onto a mitx easier another pci-e slot

[watercooled]

Pretty much. For desktops, you tend to have a spare PCIe slot or two free, and for laptop/compact desktops, there's the SFF versions. For what I've read, it isn't really any difference to just using PCIe directly on the logical level, so it seems to me more like a backwards-compatibility thing?

There are some differences to SATA 'proper' though, like the lack of the abstraction layer, and they require their own BIOS which can cause compatibility issues with being able to boot from them on certain systems.

As it says in the Wiki though, 'SATA4' might still be years away and will probably double SATA3 performance, which is less than you get with PCIe native/SATAe.

Edit: missed LSG501's post, was replying to kalniel.

@LSG501: mitx systems could just use the SFF versions of SSDs like laptops, which is even more convenient than trying to cram a 2.5" SSD and associated cables into a tiny case.

[LSG501]

@LSG501: mitx systems could just use the SFF versions of SSDs like laptops, which is even more convenient than trying to cram a 2.5" SSD and associated cables into a tiny case.

I fully expect to see another asus 'rog' or asrock itx motherboard with the m.2 slot instead of mini pcie but if the mini pcie boards are anything to go by they're likely to be pretty rare again in my opinion.

[JCBeastie]

I just CANNOT understand the point of this. It's just an ugly cobbled together socket. If you want more bandwidth then connect directly to PCI-E, SATA is a bottleneck. There's no point in having a Frankenstein's monster connector for the sake of backwards compatibility either. We should have a PCI-E cable connector for future drives and/or peripherals, and motherboards can still include a SATA chip and ports for older SSDs (which won't see any benefit from SATA Express anyway) and the disk drives that people are increasingly not using.

[watercooled]

If there was a demand for it, e.g. large SATA connector or PCIe SSDs becoming commonplace, that could change rapidly.

[Corky34]

I just CANNOT understand the point of this. It's just an ugly cobbled together socket. If you want more bandwidth then connect directly to PCI-E, SATA is a bottleneck. There's no point in having a Frankenstein's monster connector for the sake of backwards compatibility either. We should have a PCI-E cable connector for future drives and/or peripherals, and motherboards can still include a SATA chip and ports for older SSDs (which won't see any benefit from SATA Express anyway) and the disk drives that people are increasingly not using.

AFAIK you can't connect any form of drive directly to a PCIe lane, you need something between the two doing the translation.
SATAe is mainly for backward compatibility, it incorporates two normal SATA connectors that can be used to connect two SATA I, II, III drives, or one SATAe drive.
Given the choice i would prefer a MoBo with 2-3 SATAe connectors giving me the choice of using 2-3 SATAe drives or 4-6 normal SATA drives. Versus a MoBo with a single M.2 connector and 4-6 SATA III connectors.

[HalloweenJack]

intel is pushing its own propriety tech . again.