We are drowning in storage data! In the commercial markets, think of all those selfies and videos that are populating the internet every second of every day. In our embedded computing market space, think of all the data that is being generated and needs to find a storage home. Our friends at vcloudnews.com tell us that every day we generate enough data to fill up 10,000,000 Blu-ray disks! That would be a disk stack of 3,936’/1,296m or a disk stack height equal to four Eiffel Towers placed one on top of another!
Well so what, we have a lot of data to store; let’s just throw more storage drives at the problem. Drives have gotten pretty cheap and SATA drive interfaces are plentiful in today’s computer board architectures. So what’s the problem?
The problem is that at today’s SATA/III drive interface speeds this ever increasing volume of data is overwhelming and oftentimes saturating SATA or even SAS interfaces. We need a faster interface and that is where Non Volatile Memory Express or NVMe storage devices communicating over a dedicated PCI Express 3.0 interface come into play. The NVMe PCIe device interface offers the following advantages over a SATA/III interface:
- Higher performance with low data latency
- Low power consumption
- Unlimited endurance
- Higher data density
For more information on NVMe and other next generation technology such as Memory Channel Storage, see our technical note: The Future of Non-Volatile Storage.
At Trenton Systems we’re answering the bell in the data storage battles by incorporating more PCI Express driven NVMe M.2 device connectors into our processor boards, modular blade servers, mid-plane boards and riser cards. For example, the
TKL8255 system host board’s M.2 connector is driven by a x4 PCIe 3.0 link while the factory default parameters are setup for high speed NVMe SSD storage modules keyed for the Socket 3/M module format. To learn more, consult the TKL8255 product data sheet.