ADATA's Flagship M.2 SSD Pictured

[btarunr]

ADATA revealed its flagship consumer SSD in the M.2 form-factor, the SR1020NP series, which is an evolution of the AXNP280e it unveiled at this year's International CES. The drive comes in capacities of up to 1 TB, is based on LSI-SandForce 3700 series processor wired to MLC NAND flash, and a host interface with wiring for PCI-Express 2.0 x4 physical layer. Most M.2 SSDs, in contrast, are being designed for PCI-Express 2.0 x2.

That's not all, most motherboards launched on Intel's 9-series chipset feature M.2 slots with just PCI-Express 2.0 x2 wiring, with the exception of ASRock's top-end Z97-Extreme6, which features a special M.2 slot with PCI-Express 2.0 x4 wiring. Using that slot, however, will eat into the bandwidth meant for graphics cards, and the primary PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot will run at 3.0 x8, because ASRock wired the slot to the CPU's root complex. Under ideal conditions, SandForce 3700 series processors are advertised to offer sequential transfer rates as high as 1.8 GB/s. Given that, this drive should be bottlenecked on most motherboards with PCI-Express 2.0 x2 based M.2 slots. ADATA will display the drive at the 2014 Computex, early next month, alongside gaming-grade and overclocker-grade DDR4 modules.



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[sgtspiff]

1 TB on the backside of a ITX board.
Man, I wish there was mobos with double M.2 slots on the backside.

 

[Disparia]

After the unveil we'll see which capacities are available in which size. ITX boards like the one from ASRock only support 30 and 42mm M.2.

 

[Chitz]

Gone are the days of evo 1tb ^^ , hopefully in the near future we will see these drives with 4tb capacity , so these will hopefully drop in price/gb , and i will get a better gear to store all my games and home videos

 

[chodaboy19]

So this new SandForce SF-3700 is already almost maxing out the M.2 PCIe 2.0 x2 lanes configurations? This is excellent news!

 

[Hood]

I guess we'll see the full speed M.2 sockets (and multiple sockets) on the X99 boards, which will have at least 40 PCIe lanes to play around with, instead of 16. With only 16, you have to take bandwidth away from the GPU to implement a 4x slot. I think on X99 it will also be PCIe 3.0 at 4x, allowing even faster speeds. Then we'd have a great reason to upgrade. More and better things are coming, and knowing Intel's track record, support for the new features, ports, and slots will be trickled out over several generations, to maximize profit. Maybe by Broadwell-E we'll get DDR4 and PCIe 4.0, and the PCIe drive support will be faster (8x?). I love the way they hype stuff for over a year before it's ready for prime time, and by that time the next big thing is on the horizon and it's already old news.

 

[mikeangs2004]

please don't post useless or redundant comments

 

[H3LLSMAN]

2014 Computex!!!! Hopefully some more Z97 mother boards are shown, I want to see the Asus Formula

 

[mikeangs2004]

2014 Computex!!!! Hopefully some more Z97 mother boards are shown, I want to see the Asus Formula

Any motherboard that don't have M.2 32G is non-competitive

 

[mikeyanrol@yahoo.com]

So this new SandForce SF-3700 is already almost maxing out the M.2 PCIe 2.0 x2 lanes configurations? This is excellent news!

The 3rd gen sandforce ssd's are supposedly going to be out the second half of this year. Excited!!!