14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives are advancing quickly in capacity but especially in performance, as OCZ's latest controller launch will show. It's kind of ironic really that their best asset is the one moving fastest.
You'd think that it's a no-brainer that this would happen, but solid state drives would probably benefit more from a rise in raw capacity than in performance.
After all, they already are the fastest type of storage technology you can hope to find, leagues ahead of hard drives.
Nevertheless, speed is the aspect of SSDs that has been advancing the quickest, due to new ways of connecting the drive to a system.
While previously it was done through the same interface as HDDs, the SATA technology, now it's being done through the PCI Express interface as well.
That interface is what the JetExpress controller from OCZ uses. And not just any version of the interface but the newest one, PCI Express 3.0.
The OCZ JetExpress SSD controller
This chip features a PCI Express 3.0 x4 host interface, with 4 GB/s of bandwidth per direction, which leads to a total of 8 GB/s. The controller also has support for eight to sixteen ONFI channels.
Between that and the 1-2 GB of DDR3 DRAM cache, you can be sure that any solid state drive based on it will be fast. Very fast. Faster than anything really.
There is only one SSD series that will match them, the Samsung SM951, which employs similar PCI Express 3.0 x4 controller chips.
True, those drives are M.2 units, but the form factor doesn't change how they are wired through the PCI Express 3.0 root complex. They can reach 2.2 GB/s speed, almost.
Thus, we are fairly certain that the real-world performance of OCZ's own solid state drives based on JetExpress PCIe 3.0 x4 chips will have similar data rates.
The next waves of high-end laptops and tablets will benefit greatly from this, as will desktops, data centers, servers, any storage applications really.
Availability
The OCZ JetExpress SSD controller will be used in M.2, PCI Express standard form factor and NVMe solid state drives, both enterprise and PC enthusiast./gaming type.
Collections like the new Vector 180 won't see any benefits, since they're 2.5-inch, exclusively SATA-based storage units, but you can be sure that every other sort of drive will be built by the company over the following months, even though no examples made it to CES 2015. Well, other than the proof of concept M.2 drives in the attached picture anyway.
Then again, the very brief spec sheet mentions 2.5-inch "SATA" models as well, so SATA Express will get its share of attention as well (12 Gbps bandwidth that one).