News Gigabyte Z68 boards feature on-board SSD connector

Gigabyte details plans to ship motherboards with on-board mSATA ports.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2011/05/12/gigabyte-motherboards-with-on-board-ssd/1

 

And what was wrong with using a normal sata port to hook up a ssd?
It just seems like something else that will bump up the price of a new board when i have a perfectly good stand alone ssd which does exactly the same job.

 

If they put this on an itx board and the cost/size of the mSATA SSDs was acceptable then it would allow for super tiny HTPCs

 

I spy a baby blue board. The news about the mSATA might be interesting, but Gigabyte continuing to produce those wonderfully coloured boards is just awesome. :3

 

System disk.

 

Why use valuable board space for this if the performance is the same as with a "wired" connection?
In a Tablet, AI1 or notebook, OK, but on desktop?

 

i find it completely pointless. what i would REALLY like to see is sli/crossfire mobos with mini-pcie 1x slots, although these slots should be placed directly next to the normal pcie 1x slots with a switch that lets you use only one of them. if anyone really cared about having a compact SSD built into their mobo they could just get a mini-pcie ssd. they're slow, but i'm getting the impression that mSATA is slow too.

 

Gief..

 

Agreed, this would indeed make for a very good itx set up.

Other than that possible use (that probably won't happen) I struggle to see the point. Why buy a micro SSD when you can just buy an SSD as a system disk, apart from the fact that you'd need to reinstall everything (though not necessarily if you just clone the drive).

It does make me think Intel is saying "Look what we did, just because we can!"

 

The picture looks like a mini pci-e device which begs the question - why bother?

 

As I understand it, it is too allow the ssd to act as a a cache for your traditional hdd and thus "vastly" improve the read write times of the hdd.

 

i hate msata. nonstandard mini pci-e slot attached to the sata controller directly or even worse to usb controller. it made an amount of sense for netbooks where the space is so limited. this implementation on desktop boards just screams pointless in my opinion. why buy a more expensive, smaller and generally slower msata ssd when you're dealing with large desktop boards, its not like you're saving any space.

 

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-235-SE&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1894

Looks exactly like this but the solid state cache is located on the mobo rather than on the hard drive. Pointless.
Power users eg any Z68 buyer will get a proper boot SSD or not bother at all.

Sort of thing which should go on office/business range hardware were ease of use is most important.

 

if they put this on a fusion board i could make a great very small form factor htpc.

 

I said in the comments section of the Z68 preview back on 16th April that I wondered if the Z68 wouldn't feature a NAND chip on the Motherboard - I wasn't far off!

Like fingerbob says, these may have the potential to vastly improve traditional HDD performance, and possibly at a fraction of the price of a standalone SSD, (as I'm sure prices of these smaller capacity drives would fall through sale volumes). Even if a standalone SSD was used as a boot disk, this could still vastly improve the storage HDD performance.

I'm not going to knock it till I've seen it in action, as I think it could, potentially, be a very good idea.

 

This should have been an H67 feature, not used on Z68.

 

Could be used to give a more "instant on" feeling for media centers from just one hard drive.

 

I like. I've been wondering/hoping someone would finally do something like this. Now don't get me wrong, I might not utilize something like this, but I have been wondering when it was going to happen. If Soda Creek gets better with a future revision I might even take advantage of it. If I am going to be honest, it probably won't be for a boot disk.

However, it would be great for a boot/app disk split. Something like a SATA 6Gbps SSD for a boot/app drive and then a seperate mSATA SSD for an app only drive.

Say, put all your games on the mSATA, and the OS and core apps on the SATA 6Gbps drive.

This will be x10 more impressive though if they make uATX and mITX boards with mSATA ports on them for SSD storage. A nice little 4 port mITX board + an mSATA slot would be perfect for a sever board for me. SSD boot mSATA card, room for 3 SATA drives and an eSATA hookup to the last port.

Now if we could also start seeing laptops come with an mSATA slot standard on top of the DVD drive and SATA harddrive port/bay.

 

There a lot of negative reactions. I think another level in the memory hierarchy can only be a good thing when combined with traditional HDDs. While large SSD systems are obviously going to be better, I look forward to seeing if this works out as a good price-performance addition.

 

But people who buy Z68 boards aren't generally very price/performance aware. There'd rather just spend £100 on a proper boot than £50 on this kind of SSD which will be slightly worse.
It's the sort of feature that need to go on space constricted laptops/media servers, budget build were £50 or so more for near SSD performance is good and mainstream computer hardware were an auto managed SSD cache is fine but the end consumer would be confused by the presence of two separate drives.