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  • gandergray - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    Thank you for the article. I'm looking forward to PCIe SSDs.

    Check the second sentence of your final thoughts: You may need to add an “a”.
  • gandergray - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    Third sentence.
  • Kristian Vättö - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    Fixed! Thanks for the heads up :)
  • B3an - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    Can you boot an OS from a PCIe SSD? Does Win 8 support it?

    And does the SF3700 controller also support Win 8's eDrive feature? (hardware accelerated BitLocker encryption).
  • extide - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    I don't see why you wouldn't able to. It wouldn't be any different (OS wise) than an PCI sata controller + sata SSD in the same device. Also the specs show it supports AHCI on the PCIe side, so it should work with everything that supports AHCI, which is pretty much everything these days.
  • otherwise - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    Does this mean we're not likely to see enthusiast PCI-E SSDs in any PCI-E form factor except for M.2? At this point I really don't want to settle for less than 500GB or 1TB SSDs and would be incredibly upset if these sizes are going to be stuck on SATA3 for the next generation.
  • Kristian Vättö - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    Oh, absolutely not. We will see 2.5" SATA Express (i.e. PCIe) SSDs. The enthusiast level controller (SF3739) doesn't even support SATA, so all drives based on it will be solely PCIe 2.0 x4, including 2.5" ones.
  • The Von Matrices - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    Is there a 2.5" PCIe x4 SSD form factor? I thought SATA Express was only PCIE x2. Will these only be available as PCIe cards?
  • DanNeely - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    sata express offers up to 2 lanes of PCIe 3.0 bandwidth; other than 2.0 4x needing twice as many lanes (and more controller hardware as a result) I don't see any reason it shouldn't be designable to fall back on a wider 2.0 bus and unless Intel either ups the number of CPU lanes from 16 to 18 or 20, or upgrades the south bridge to support 3.0 most enthusiast systems will have to use 2.0 because we have GPUs using up all the 3.0 lanes.
  • DanNeely - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    Intel isn't going lack support for SATA Express in next year's 9x series chipsets. If the only enthusiast boards to support it directly are from AMD (I don't know what their plans are) or those using 3rd party controllers; and the lesser SATA supporting controllers are only offered in M2 form factors it seems that SandForce might actually end up a noshow in enthusiast systems if the 3rd party controllers are expensive enough to cause chicken and egg problems.

    http://techreport.com/news/25649/report-intel-9-se...
  • The Von Matrices - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    No special 3rd party controllers are needed if you just make PCIe x4 cards. There are plenty of systems with spare PCIe 2.0 x4 slots. That will work until SATA Express becomes more widespread.

    The problem is that SATA Express is still a bottleneck for this controller since this controller has PCIe 2.0 and not 3.0. If this controller can truly use 2 GB/s of interface bandwidth, then using SATA Express at 1GB/s will be a bottleneck.
  • iwod - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    Why PCI-E 2.0 and not 3.0 when its intended target shipping date is next year? Broadwell will have enough lanes for that.
    So we could enjoy those speed without the need of using 4 lanes.

    And I still dont get how SATA Express fits into the Equation. ( So basically Controller supporting PCI-E = instant support of SATA Express, surely it aren;t that simple. )
  • The Von Matrices - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    SATA Express is the next generation SATA standard. The SATA consortium gave up with trying to double the bandwidth of SATA 6Gb/s and used the PCIe standard instead, so SATA express is really just a new connector for PCIe x2. SATA Express also does support backwards compatibility of SATA 6Gb/s as long as the controller supports it.

    The problem is that SATA Express supports only two lanes, so you will not get this drive's full bandwidth using SATA Express. My guess is that the enthusiast SSDs will ship in both SATA Express and PCIe x4 cards, with the PCIe card SSDs having double the interface bandwidth of SATA Express SSDs.

    You're right, it would be much better if LSI shipped this as PCIe 3.0 x2 instead of PCIe 2.0 x4 so that there would be no interface bandwidth difference between PCIe cards and SATA Express.
  • haukionkannel - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    The one thing to remebember is that 3700 series is very modular, so it should be guite easy to upgrade this to PCIe 3.0... Allso guite a lot of allready sold computer are "only" using PPCIe 2.0 so there are more market for that version. Allso it seems that 2.0 is fast enough for this controller, so it may be the main reason to stay on it at this moment.
  • The Von Matrices - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    LSI is advertising 1800MB/s read and write from this controller, which is a lot more than 1000MB/s of PCIe 2.0 x2 (what it would be on SATA Express). Hopefully a revision will ad PCIe 3.0 support, as you suggested.
  • iwod - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link

    Well Sold computer as in PC. The world is moving towards Notebook and even Tablet. It is happening now, and more so when this thing ship. Hopefully they will have a new revision with PCI-E 3.0 soon for OEM. Although it would properly take another 2 - 3 months for Apple to validate its use on their System.
  • zanon - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link

    For most scenarios outside of enterprise, DuraWrite seems to be a pretty uninteresting feature at this point. Full disk encryption is (and should be) the standard for all mobile scenarios, and as more powerful CPUs and/or hardware acceleration makes the performance cost completely negligible is a good idea for desktops too. That makes all data full entropy, with any compression moving up the stack to the filesystem (where it belongs) or in some cases the OS. Both major modern filesystems, ZFS and BTRFS, handle compression themselves, and offer more flexibility in where to use it and what algorithms to use. I'm glad to see that they're basing their targets around incompressible data, with anything else that can be squeezed out in some workloads being a nice bonus but not something to be depended on.

    The rest of what they're doing looks quite interesting though and seems to be where more of their attention is anyway. The question will definitely be whether they can firmly and completely handle all the concerns the brand has built up around reliability, and deliver something rock solid from the get-go. If they can it looks like they'll have some unique features to add to the mix, including the lack of DRAM, but as you said if there was another major flub it'd be pretty disastrous given how competitive the market is now.
  • ickibar1234 - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link

    I hope this new controller will be in SATA 3 2.5" SSDs! The industry needs a bump with queue=1 IOPs. Right now performance is stagnant between the OCZ Vertex 4, Vector, Samsung 840 Pro and other top end 2.5" SATA 3 SSDs. Time for a new jump in performance for SATA 3!
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link

    IOPS at QD=1 is limited by NAND performance (can't take advantage of parallelism), not controller.
  • blanarahul - Sunday, April 20, 2014 - link

    Correction: "Read IOPS at QD=1......"
  • Sabresiberian - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link

    Well I'm excited. :) Of course the question now is "price", but I expect we'll see a significant reduction over current PCIe SSD solutions. Might bring it down to "affordable" on my next build.
  • etamin - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link

    why did they have to name it SF3700? makes for confusion with the existing Intel S3700 ssd.

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