How to Step Beyond SATA
As long as data storage relied on conventional hard drives, it was easy for storage interfaces to keep up with transfer rates. The switch to solid state drives changed the equation drastically making it possible for storage to saturate the bus with ease.
What is a Hard Drive Interface?
Every form of non-volatile storage needs a way to connect to the motherboard. The first real standard was PATA, or parallel ATA, but it gave way to later generations of technology and high-RPM drives, later superseded by Serial ATA, or SATA, which quickly became the new standard and is now facing its own challengers:
- SATA: Now up to its third revision, this standard offers up to 6 Gbps for SATA-based drives. Its big advantage is that it was designed from the ground up as an HDD interface with support for features like booting.
- PCIe: PCI Express adds speed, but the protocol was not designed for storage, which can be an issue with PCIe-based SSDs.
- NVMe: The NVMe protocol was specifically designed for SSDs over PCIe. It leverages the efficiencies of the host interface along with native storage support, enabling a more efficient usage of the existing speeds of PCI Express.
How Do You Choose a Hard Disk?
Choosing the right storage solution involves more than just flipping a coin between a PCIe SSD and a SATA SSD. There are a number of factors to consider in order to make sure your internal solid-state drive offers the performance and reliability you need without crowding your data out. There are two factors to consider when selecting your next drive.
- Interface: There are several ways to connect a hard drive over PCI Express. You can use a slot-based drive that fits neatly into a PCI slot, or an NVMe SSD with an M.2 connector for a high-performance system. Another option if your system doesn't support PCI-E storage is an mSATA SSD.
- Capacity: The more capacity you have, the better off you are as there are few things less enjoyable than running out of storage. Speed also links with capacity in SSDs as more banks of NAND can take advantage of parallelism for faster reads and writes. A 512 GB PCI Express SSD can be significantly faster than a 256 GB mSATA drive.
Using PCIe Storage
As long as your operating system supports it, you can just drop your new HDD in the appropriate PCIe slot. The drive will give you access to plenty of high speed storage for anything from photos to video editing. The benefit is that once installed, it's completely transparent to the user. All you have to do is use the computer as normal while enjoying the rapid boots and game loads that PCIe brings to the desktop.