Samsung Unleashes Huge 1.6TB SSD with PCIe NVMe Technology

Updated: July 23, 2013

Samsung’s new XS175 series of SSD drives were unveiled today, they reach an unparalleled 1.6 terabytes of storage. Using the Non-Volatile Memory Express standard means performance should see a significant boost since it sends data straight to the PCI Express bus instead of the traditional SATA hub.

The old SATA standard has gone through several stages of evolution since its adoption in 2003; however, it wasn’t developed with SSD in mind. The consequence of that is that it quickly showed its limitation in its limiting technology.

Originally in enterprise solutions, NVMe brings with it huge strides of technological improvements over AHCI such as multiple queing, 64K submission queues and 64K completion queues.

Additionally, these queues can be weighted or prioritized to a varying degree, depending on the needs of system access. Although there have been SSD’s to use the PCIe bus before, none have benefited from the technology of NVMe – Samsung is the first to implement it.

You’ll want to seek out SATA Express as the next generation of chipset to support NVMe as they use the PCIe for their native interface, bumping the overall bandwidth to 8Gb/s.

It’s a supporting technology to NVMe – it only outlines the specifics for the design of the physical connectors. The overseeing body of SATA Express tells us that its move to support NVMe was not only its performance increase but also because of its superior power management operations.

We expect to see the first implementations of SATA Express chipsets in 2014 when Intel releases its Broadwell. It is fully backwards with AHCI and NVMe so one won’t have to stress about getting new drives in order to use the new chipset.

Source: Extreme Tech