Gadgetory

if you've been watching the development of solid-state drives or SSDs you might have noticed a trend over the last few years peak throughput the maximum speed that you can read from or write to an SSD was increasing by leaps and bounds approaching 600 megabytes per second and then poof it stopped now that's not because SSDs can be faster but because say two three six gigabit per second the interface that they use to connect to your PC tops out at around that speed creating a bottleneck of course this problem is nothing new history lesson time serial ata or SATA was actually introduced way back in 2003 to replace parallel ata or peda which you might remember as those bulky flat gray cables that you saw inside your parents old packard-bell kata topped out at around 133 megabytes per second which was fine for slow mechanical hard drives and since SSDs were virtually unknown in the consumer PC space there wasn't much need for anything faster for most users I mean even the jump from pay to 100 to pay to 133 was considered superfluous at the time with the first revision of SATA we saw throughput modestly increased to 150 megabytes per second then it doubled to 300 megabytes per second on the second Rev and doubled again to 600 megabytes per second on the third to try to keep up with user demand test and SSDs became more ubiquitous and at this point you may be asking okay Ben Linus why don't they just double it again and give us twelve hundred megabytes per second of throughput with those little SATA cables that are so good for case airflow well one of the main hurdles is actually power simply boosting the speed of the SATA connection beyond six gigabit per second takes a lot more juice so the powers that be decided to go in a bit of a different direction enter SATA Express unlike previous SATA revisions this isn't just a faster version of the same fundamental technology SATA Express is truly different in that it really isn't its own interface at all what's it Express does is it connects your SSDs directly to your computer's PCI Express Lanes PCI Express is such an efficient and FASS interface but even the previous revision pcie 2.0 wouldn't bottleneck the latest graphics cards in most situations so it should be pretty easy to imagine the performance gains you could get by using PCIe to connect to your storage devices modern implementations of SATA Express can achieve anywhere from one gigabyte per second to four gigabytes per second and can continue to scale in the future there are some other cool things about SATA Express - one is called MDOT - which is okay not quite say it Express but a closely related standard that allows little tiny high performance SSDs to be mounted on adding cards with MDOT to slots and a second is called nvme or non-volatile memory express this is a new logical way to access storage that is correctly optimized for high speed solid-state devices it replaces ahci the older driver that controls SATA drives and was designed for magnetic drives nvme was specifically made for PCI Express based SSDs and will offer lower latency and take better advantage of the high degree of parallelization that is possible with these sorts of devices among other performance improvements well Linus all this sounds just peachy but how do I get my hands on SATA Express the answer is that you can't yet many motherboards with either an Intel h97 or z97 chipset will have SATA Express ports which are thankfully backwards compatible with a couple of SATA plugs to regular 6-game bit per second drives but at this time there are no SATA Express drives available to general consumers to plug into them of course if you're a real speed demon who just can't wait remember that right now you can pick up true PCI Express SSDs that slot directly into the board or and dot two SSDs that also utilize the PCI Express bus as I mentioned before both of these will be able to give you speeds far beyond what you'd be able to get with SATA 3 in theory although in practice ah the difference might not be that noticeable to most people speaking of differences that are noticeable to most people do you ever feel like it's time to take your personal potential beyond what most people think it is Wow terrible segue where is he going with this you might ask he's going to talk about today's sponsor lynda.com winda comm offers reasonably priced professionally produced educational content from industry experts so you can brush up on existing skills or even hone entirely new ones it's great for hobbyists like photographers and great for professionals like well pro photographers they can benefit from lynda.com too but the point is not just photography but also music business 3d modeling sky's the limit and the best thing is that this guy costs nothing to try out head over to lynda.com slash tech quickie linked in the video description to get a 10-day no-strings-attached trial for free and start learning today guys thanks for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked leave a comment if you have suggestions for future fast as possible we really do read them and really do check and try to make those videos and as always don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already