PCI Express hard drives?

So i am obviously way out of the loop here...

Stopped gaming for the most part about 6 years ago...Still building systems [H]ard though..other than the graphics card end of the things. Anyway...i was looking at a laptop for my kids to use and was leaning towards a Macbook pro, mainly because of the imessage and facetime features for the kids..and that i have always wanted to try out OSX other than than for 20 minutes in store every few months. So i start reading about the the specs and then i come across these soldered in PCI-E hard drives..I read a few reviews and apparently the smoke standard SATA drives??

Is this true? Is this going to become the new mainstream thing for drives?...I "think" i remember hearing about PCI-E being used for the future of hard drives about 8yrs ago when they really started taking over.

Anyway...just curious about it.


Thanks

Yep its true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2

The specification offers some legacy connections in addition to a few PCIe lanes. Recent SSDs were fully saturating sata links (>600MB/s), the new standard pushes speeds up to almost 4GB/s.

EDIT: Apple might be using a custom PCIe SSD - but the effect is pretty much the same.

Plextor makes a PCIe SSD, it's only 2x, but still should be faster than a SATA one. http://www.amazon.com/Plextor-Series-Express-Internal-PX-AG256M6e/dp/B00JM2EQTS

I read a few reviews and apparently the smoke standard SATA drives??

Click to expand...

Mostly only in benchmarks. For most desktop operations or games you will not see a big difference because in these cases most of the time SATA III is no where near a bottleneck. This is also why RAID0 has limited benefit for a few desktop applications and no benefit for the OS.

drescherjm said:

Mostly only in benchmarks. For most desktop operations or games you will not see a big difference because in these cases most of the time SATA III is no where near a bottleneck. This is also why RAID0 has limited benefit for a few desktop applications and no benefit for the OS.

Click to expand...

This, unless you are coping large files from one driver to another in the same machine this might matter, but in desktop applications and normal use, you will not get the current line of SSDs to max out SATA III.

PCIe has the ability to read and write at the same time, which reduces latency which is far more important than any bandwidth metric. However, they are still using old crappy protocols, such as AHCI.
The real revolution begins with NVMe. Once they begin to use that latency will drop even further. at that point its a no-brainer.--with SSDs of course. HDD not so much.