CES 2014 SSD RoundUp and a Look at The Year Ahead

PCIE SSDS ARE ON THEIR WAY

The success of PCIe SSD Adapters has been very limited in the past few years and discussion for rerasoning for such is much longer than the scope of this article.  Thanks primarily to the announcement of the LSI SandForce SF3700 controller, however, this is about to change and there was no shortage of companies displaying prototypes of things to come on release of this controller.  We saw this first in our visit to Avant where they spoke very briefly of their upcoming Scorpion 2 PCIe SSD pictured here:

This meeting was followed by Kingston who had their new Kingston PCIe Predator up and running, this adapter again containing the LSI SandForce SF3700 flash controller.  Still under the control of LSI, Kingston could only display read speeds of 1.8GB/s that we have seen several times already.

Kingston hasn’t nailed the exact color they would like for this product just yet and, throughout the week, we were able to find the Predator in red, blue and black

PLEXTOR PCIE HHHL SSD

Last but not least, Plextor displayed a branf new PCIe SSD card containing none other than their M6e PCIe M.2 SSD.  You may remember our review of the IO-Switch Raijin awhile back and this is very closely related to that.  This SSD will be available as a retail item and, along with the M6e, should be available within a few months.

Containing the Plextor M6e, this SSD is device is capable of up to 770MB/s read and 625MB/s write and also breaks the SATA barrier.  Don’t hold your breath though as Plextor and Marvell are partners and we would bet that, right around the time of this release, we will be seeing PCIe X4 solutions capable of twice the speed with Marvell’s Altaplus controller.

THE YEAR AHEAD

Although there remains to be much that can’t be discussed about the year ahead, CES 2014 provided a birds eye view of where we are going in the storage industry.  As increased SSD performance hits the media professional first and foremost, this demographic will be key to initial sales.  Imagine working with the manipulation of media day in and day out and being able to double, if not triple your productivity.  From a personal perspective, much of the work I do is dependent on the effectiveness of the SSD and its speeds and I couldn’t imagine reverting to a hard drive for media work.  I cannot start to describe the number of times I thanked the Tech Gods for blessing us with M.2 PCIe SSD speeds while working abroad.