News First SATA 6Gbps chipset is likely bottlenecked

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/06/04/first-sata-6gbps-chipset-is-likely-bottlene/1

COMPUTEX 2009: EVGA claims it'll continue testing SATA 6Gbps and won't use it until it knows it's worthwhile.

 

Hmm, interesting opinion. Some benchmark numbers would be nice.

 

"...especially if the claim of a performance bottleneck is true."

Well, it's not hard to work out: a single PCI-E 2.0 lane can carry only 500MiB/sec in either direction. 6Gbps is 750MiB/sec. Even if it doesn't theoretically reach that, it's still likely to be higher than the single PCI-E 2.0 lane can carry.

Fair play to them, in all honesty. It would only serve to drive the price up, and if you can really afford an SSD that can challenge the rate of 3Gbit SATA, then you shouldn't have an issue purchasing a 6Gbit SATA controller, that sits in a 2x/4x interface.

 

I'll only really care about SATA 6Gbps (why not call it SATA3? Or does that run too much risk of confusion with SATA2/SATA 3Gbps?) when drives start to saturate the SATA2 bandwidth available. And currently the only things getting even close to that on sustained transfers are ludicrously expensive RAID SSD setups.

 

Not going to be a problem for a while, seeing as the majority of drives don't even get close to SATA II speeds anyway. The limit isn't with the connection, its with the drives themselves.

If I could afford a large SSD that would max out my SATA II connections, that'd be great - but I know it won't happen for a few years.

 

That's exactly why. SATA2 and SATA3 are incorrect names that people just made up to coincide with the release version, and such a naming scheme is exactly what SATA-IO didn't want. Officially, they are called SATA 1.5, SATA 3 and SATA 6 so that there is no confusion when it comes to transfer speeds.

SATA II Misnomer

 

Ah, the wonders of the internet - once someone has coined something, if it becomes popular it doesn't matter if it's technically inaccurate!

Of course, the motherboard manufacturers are seriously to blame for that, then - my SATA 3Gbps ports are all labelled 'SATAII' or 'SATA2'.

 

Well.. my fastest drive doesnt even get close to saturating the current SATA, and seeing as this will not really see the light of day until it makes economic sense on a mainstream board, I'm not bothered right now.

Just a shame that X58 will no longer be a mainstream/enthusiast board by then.. thanks Intel

 

I'd say 6 Gibibit/s is their *maximum* theoritical bandwidth, and so that doesn't imply that they will use all of those bandwidth. How fast are the current fastest SSD throughput? 250 Mebibyte/s? If so, that single-lane would be sufficient (at least for now).

 

Interesting that an HDD interface is faster then PCI Express Single Lane. Where is PCI Express 3.0 anyway?

 

No need to stress, PCI-E 3.0 and SATA 6.0 are ready when they are needed, until then why bump up motherboard prices in such tight market conditions.

 

PCI-e 1x is 256MB/s each way (total 512M/s bandwidth but 256MB/s each way only), so Sata 600 most likely does around 550MB/s, they need to use PCI-e 2x or 4x Link or higher

made the above before finding the link below

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-e

even in full duplex its 512MB/s (256MB/s each way), so its not any faster then SATA 300 bit slower in fact (why you norm find that raid cards are norm 2x or 4x PCI-e cards)

Edit
Ops i forgot about PCI-e 2.0 spec it is double the PCI-e 1.0 spec (still need to be PCI-e 2x or 4x thought if its connected via 2.0 spec, as one SSD drive could max it out next year)

 

There are such things as port multipliers for SATA, which, when released for SATA 6Gbps, would allow for more than a few SATA 3Gbps drives to utilise a single connection. This is done far more often with SAS drives, but with all that extra bandwidth per lane, it's increasingly likely that manufacturers will begin utilising SATA multipliers too.

Yes, but what happens when that changes? When there's an SSD that can muster 500MiB/sec? OCZ have recently announced a 3.5" SATA drive, that contains two of their Vertex drives and a RAID0 controller. It won't be long before they are requiring more than a single PCI-E 2.0 lane can carry, and whichever motherboard manufacturer that glazes over this fact is going to have severe amounts of egg on their face (and a tarnished reputation amongst the enthusiast crowd).

This is already in the 2nd reply, towards the top of the thread. Why did you just repeat it?