Intel 9 series chipset support greater speed than SATA3

Intel 9 series chipset have started rolling out slowly. In desktop we have Z97 and H97. Mobile chipset is HM97.

What is new about 9 series chipset is that it allow greater speeds than SATA3, a current limitation holding us back for many years now.
Computers with 9 series chipset have 8 PCIe Gen2 lanes. Whats new is that the chipset allow the usage of two PCIe Gen2 lanes to be used for PCIe SSDs with Intel's Rapid Storage Technology driver. What this means is that the driver allows any PCIe SSD to be used as a primary bootable drive. Like the SSDs we use today.
What notebook manufacturers can do is route the 2 lanes we have available thanks to the 9 series chipset, in to a M2 connector, thus allow 1GB/s speeds (1 lane of Gen2 = 500MB/s). Which means that M2 SSDs can do 1GB/s. We already have motherboards in desktops
The chipset also allow 4 lanes to be used for speeds up to 2GB/s (500MB/s * 4), and a couple of motherboard OEMs have just done that and routed it to a M2 connector, called "Ultra M2". The problem with this is that they will not have IRST support and have to rely on third party drivers.

There are several M2 SSDs out there already that have controller that can handle the speeds 9 series chipset can do, like Samsung XP941


You can find a review of Samsung XP941 @ Tomshardware that tested the drive with both 2 lanes and 4 lanes here:
ASRock Z97 Extreme6, M.2 PCIe, And Samsung's XP941 SSD
(Note that author says NVMe support (coming in Q4) will allow the SSD to operate much better).

There is also recent news that Intel will be coming with Intel 750 SSD in M2 factor in Q4, just in time for NVMe...
http://www.techpowerup.com/201937/updated-intel-roadmap-reveals-ssd-750-series-m-2-push-by-company.html


More about the subject here:
http://techreport.com/review/26443/this-is-intel-9-series-chipset


So this is the future guys. Hopefully we will see new notebooks with the 9 series chipset (HM97) have implemented the PCIe support 9 series chipset allow. Everything is ready for a full rollout. Drives are here and will continue to grow, notebook OEMs doesnt need to rely on third party controllers anymore since Intel now have native support.

 

Here's another review on the Samsung XP941.
Samsung XP941 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD Review

And one in the ASRock Z97 Extreme6
ASRock Z97 Extreme6 PCIe Ultra M.2 Storage Performance Overview

It fared a little better in a Z87 with adapter. It's a scorcher in speed and heat 114C

 

That's pretty cool.

I don't think I have use for 1GB/s speeds. So I'll keep waiting for the larger capacity Sata3 SSDs to come down in price.

 

As hard as it is to believe, the current PCIe SSDs already saturate this new x2 interface. Intel's always been too stingy with its allocation of PCIe lanes. This new interface should've been either x4 or PCIe 3.0 from the get go. Current implementation is way not future proof enough, otherwise, it is just a repeat of the SATA3 vs SATA2 days.

Try hooking up that XP941 to 4 lanes of PCIe 2.0 direct to the CPU as per that AsRock motherboard, difference is night and day.

 

Wait, wait, wait!!!

114C nand chips when run to spec's?

Maximum 30 Minutes of use (128KB sequential!!!) and we get to 20/50 (guess) MB's?

This is just the 1TB EVO (SATA) dressed up in M.2 clothing...


Samsung, you just lost a few future sales (again).


Seems like I am still waiting for a true replacement to the current sustained performance champ; the SanDisk Extreme II 480GB. (Granted/no doubt the performance is much lower - but it gives me more than 30 minutes of 'wow' too, before falling to sub HDD performance levels).

At $3/GB this is not anywhere close to 'value' - even for a consumer workload, let alone 'enterprise'.

At the $$/GB of an EVO though, this is where it might become interesting (depending on what else is available by then).

Samsung doesn't get performance like Intel does. Performance is not benchmarks. Performance is not at the cost of the life of the product (this thing runs HOT). Performance is not for a simple sprint on a short track.

Performance is a balance and careful tuning of parameters that not only look good in marketing materials, but also give real world performance that can be counted on from day to day and from year to year (and not just to just past the warranty period either).

Having nand last for a decade is nice (yawn). Having a supposedly high performance PCIe x4 lane SSD perform at HDD levels after 30 minutes of use is stupidity at it's finest.


Looking for an Intel and/or SanDisk and/or Crucial version of these technologies - Samsung still doesn't 'get it', by a long shot.


Pseudo-SLC tricks are nice for the kids - where are the real tools?

 

Anandtech also did a review of the Samsung XP941
AnandTech | Samsung SSD XP941 Review: The PCIe Era Is Here
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The drives and controllers I know which will support M2 through PCIe (HM97 chipset) are the following:
Sandforce SF3700:
ADATA (unkown name) 240GB-2TB, supports up to 4 PCIe lanes and up to 1.8GB/s.
OWC with SF3739. Support up to 4 lanes PCIe and up to 1.8GB/s. Capacity unknown.
Mushkin Helix M2 - Supports up to 2 lanes of PCIe and 1.0GB/s. Capcacity will be up to 512GB.
Intel 750 - Up to 1500MB/s/110MB/s - Capacity unknown. Controller not disclosed but Intel seems to be fond of Sandforce controllers so I put it here.

Marvell 88SS9293:
Kingston HyperX M.2 - 1400MB/s with support for up to 4 PCIe lanes. Capacity unknown

Marvell 88SS9183:
SanDisk A110 - 740MB/s - 128GB/256GB

Samsung S4LNO53X01:
Samsung XP941 - Supports up to 4 PCIe lanes for speeds up to 1.2GB/s. Capcacity up to 512GB


All these drives are coming in Q4 2014/Q1 2015

 

Plextor joins the M2 PCIe SSD race with Plextor M6e.
770MBs read and 625MB/s write.
105K IOPs read 4K and 100K write 4K.

The drive is using a Marvell PCIe 9183 controller.
Plextor expands M6e range with M.2 form factor SSD - Storage - Press Release - HEXUS.net

Another drive thats ready to replace SATA3 when 9 series chipset and new notebooks with M2 slots release.

 

You can see this on the current MacBook Pro with Retina Display models. The ones with 512 GB or less have 2-lane SSDs while the optional 1 TB version apparently uses all 4 to achieve performance upward of 1 GB/s. The other drives top out at around 700 MB/s.

 

Its not up to the SSD how many lanes it can use. Well it is but the motherboard ultimately decide.
Its up to the motherboard and how to get 2 or 4 lanes to the M2 connector where you plug in the SSD.

2 lanes can be routed from the PCIe bus, 4 lanes have to be routed from the CPU slot I think if I dont remember wrong. Which makes it extremely difficult, so 2 lanes is most likely what we will get with the upcoming notebooks with 9 series chipset.

Still a very good upgrade with 1000MB/s and much less latency over SATA3.

 

Despite the high sequential numbers of the PCIe SSD, a SATA SSD is outperforming these current 2-lane drives in an OS environment. So, if notebooks only get 2 lanes it doesn't look so promising, at the moment.

Look at the single drive performance here:
Intel 730 480GB 6-Drive SSD RAID Report

 

We havent seen any PCIe M2 SSDs tested with NVMe yet. They are still using the AHCI protocol like Tweaktown did, which will slow down the non SATA drives.

But even without NVMe the M2 SSDs have:

Greatly reduced latency and access time.
Greatly increased sequential speeds
Greatly increased 4K IOPS. Just look at the drives listed above that are coming. They cross the 100K barrier SATA drives have today. Even the Plextor M6e M2 which are a low end PCIe M2 SSD beats SATA drives here.
++

This will only increase when NVMe is released.
Anandtech did a review of the first NVMe drive couple of weeks ago .And it shows what a PCIe M2 SSD can do vs SATA drives. Mind you, this particular drive is a pure PCIe SSD, so sequential speeds will be a bit higher than our M2 PCIe SSDs.

Here is Service time in one of their benches which shows how ridiculous superior NVMe is to SATA drives

Light workload, heavy workload, latency, deep queue depths, dealing with incompressible data.
They are just miles ahead when using NVMe over AHCI

Its no doubt the future

 

Agreed, NVMe is the future. It's protocol is made for non-volatile memory not HDD's AHCI protocol. But the future is not now. 2016, maybe, for notebooks?

 

M2 PCIe SSDs with NVMe are expected this year.

Details about PCIe SSDs and NVMe can be found here. Really good read that covers performance, architecture, drivers, power and heat, future updates about NVMe etc
https://intel.activeevents.com/sz14/connect/fileDownload/session/AC3C379311BD4BE91BA5425C2702BED8/SZ14_SSDS002_100_ENGf.pdf

TweakTown also recently wrote about NVMe
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6468/defining-nvme-hands-on-testing-with-the-1-6tb-intel-p3700-ssd/index7.html

 

Yeah, I'm waiting for TweakTown's full review of the Intel P3700.

This from the Tech Report link.

Even if there are M2 NVMe drives released this year, that would, generally, be after 2015 models are released, as I understand it.

My real concern is that notebook manufacturers get wooed by PCIe's high sequential numbers and build gimped 2-lane systems that a SATA SSD outperforms as an OS drive and this delays the real speed breakthrough. Of course, there are recent examples to show this; early USB3 support, SATAII/III, notebook releases; first model year mSATA SATA2 port, HDD bay SATA3 port, ODD SATA2 port, next model year mSATA, HDD bay SATA3, ODD still SATA2. And this is not the budget models but Alienware, Clevo, etc.

 

I'm going to remain cautious about latency improvements unless the m.2 slot is directly hooked up to the CPU PCIe lanes instead of the current drive->pch->DMI->CPU