NezSez writes regarding an article in extremetech:
"SATA Express is SATA and PCIe over cables (preserving backwards compatibility) and NVMe is the next improvement of AHCI with much lower latencies by using the PCIe bus/lanes. Both have been developed to improve access to SSD's which have their own processors on-board and can communicate quicker than mechanical drives. The specifications look good (up to 4 times faster and can scale with improvements of PCIe) but analysts suspect it will only be adopted for small form factors.
(Score: 4, Informative) by tynin on Monday March 17 2014, @01:49PM
Someone like Supermicro will no doubt design some server boards with NVMe if it performs better. Many enterprise grade servers have been moving to SSDs, especially when the cost of 1TB drives have been falling in price [amazon.com] to be extremely competitive with 10k SAS drives [amazon.com], nevermind how much better random IOPS are with these SSDs.
Other companies will no doubt follow, and next thing you know it, it'll be available on practically every motherboard.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday March 17 2014, @02:31PM
Only slightly off topic, I bet I'm not the only guy here on SN trying to milk my legacy spinning hard drives as long as I can get them to work, until SSDs like the link are cheap enough for the upgrade. Come on Moores law, got less than a factor of two till I pull the trigger on two of those 1 TB from the link for my home server...
(Score: 1) by WizardFusion on Monday March 17 2014, @02:36PM
I agree, I just bought 4x 4TB HD simply because I need the space (RAID-10) and 4TB SSDs are just a pipe dream at the moment.
(Score: 1) by tynin on Monday March 17 2014, @02:36PM
Agreed completely. The price is SO close I'm almost ready to buy one of those. The days of HDD are very much numbered, except perhaps for banks of slow spinning disks for archival purposes.
(Score: 4, Informative) by wantkitteh on Monday March 17 2014, @03:28PM
I don't think the days of spinning disks are anywhere near over. The cost per GB and size per unit is still a hell of a lot better than solid state can manage yet.
(Score: 3, Informative) by wantkitteh on Monday March 17 2014, @03:34PM
...although having said that, I realised that I'm automatically in my head comparing 7k SATA and SSD, not 10k SAS and SSD. So I must qualify my statement and say that the only defense SAS will shortly have is it's legacy support in everyone's racks.
(Score: 2) by hankwang on Monday March 17 2014, @07:25PM
"The days of HDD are very much numbered"
Moore's law applies to memory, CPUs, hard disks, and video file size. Unless you don't store multimedia, I wouldn't count on SSDs surpassing HDDs anywhere soon...
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(Score: 2) by tynin on Monday March 17 2014, @07:41PM
Indeed, that is why I mentioned the spinning disks will still be used for archival (of multimedia it sounds like for your purposes). Still, I suspect things may very well change in this arena in the next 3 years. Time will tell.
(Score: 2, Informative) by emg on Monday March 17 2014, @09:26PM
"Moore's law applies to memory, CPUs, hard disks, and video file size."
Not any more. I've had 3TB drives for at least a couple of years, and it looks like 5TB has only just been announced, with 4TB the largest that's widely available.