back to article Welcome to the fast-moving world of flash connectors

Flash is the new storage medium of choice and this has led to an explosion of interconnect options. Magnetic disks are slow and not particularly latency sensitive; interconnects designed for them just don't cut it in a world where flash drives can be 10 times faster and are highly latency sensitive. Let's take a quick look at …

  1. Heisenberg

    No Thunderbolt?

    I would have expected Thunderbolt to be included in this list (or maybe it's deemed a sub-technology riding over the top of one of those mentioned?) It's certainly one of the fastest methods of connectivity in the consumer space today...

    1. phuzz Silver badge

      Re: No Thunderbolt?

      This is pretty much only covering internal connections (USB/iSCSI notwithstanding). Thunderbolt is for connecting external devices only as far as I know.

  2. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    And here's me...

    Just trying to get a few hundred meg of 8-pin flash chips talking to me...

  3. danXtrate

    Is it just me or this article gets iSCSI all wrong? iSCSI means sending and receiving SCSI commands through an IP network. Key word: IP. You can send SCSI commands through other types of networks such FC.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    NVMe.... mmmmm good

    Been playing with some of the new Intel NMVe boards in esxi servers running View, using the Intel pre-release driver. Pretty sweet, and after three weeks in use, solid as a rock.

    One of the selling points around NVMe is its simplicity and limited command set. The Intel vib (driver) for esxi is only 29K - yes, that's a K! I see that as a big plus for the protocol.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Picture is worth...

    A pic of the SATAe connector/cable would have made the description a lot easier to grok. I really didn't get it until I GISed it.

    Other than that, good, informative piece. So thanks.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Picture is worth...

      Yeah, lost opportunity to pose some Playmobil characters with the connectors :)

      ... or it didn't happen.

  6. phuzz Silver badge
    Facepalm

    ouch

    I thought I had a good idea about modern storage connections, now my head hurts.

    (thanks for the article though, apart from the lack of pictures it was very useful)

  7. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    What I get out of this

    What I get out of this, personally, is to probably wait 6 months to a year for things to settle (given the descriptions, hopefully on SFF-8693, since it supports 2xSATA for compatibility and PCIe for fast flash, albeit not both at once.) I feel like if I were going to buy flash now, I'd just get SATA despite it's disadvantages. Of course for a server setup, people don't seem to mind relatively bespoke hardware so going with whatever is fastest is probably fine.

    Edit: Excellent article BTW! I had no idea all that was going on, I just assumed these guys were working on SATA-4 or whatever.

  8. Malcolm Weir Silver badge

    I find this article technically incoherent. And sometimes dead wrong.

    For example, the assertion that mSATA is not electrically compatible with mPCIe is just wrong. They can be. Not every implementation is, but the two sets of signals can co-exist on the same connector, so that seems to suggest (to me) that they are electrically compatible, but not interoperable. Or something.

    Also, Fibre Channel is not the same as SCSI FCP. This would be an OK generalization to make, exceot that the earlier bit about iSCSI suggests the author at least understands the difference between a command protocol and the transport protocol, although for the rest of the article he forgets it!

  9. unitron
    Joke

    "Windows 10's only real selling feature"

    I thought "not being Windows 8" was supposed to be it's selling point.

    (they really need a 'snark alert' icon)

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