Feature Testing: SATA Express Results
Aside from the fact that it is included on basically every Z170 motherboard, there has basically been zero new developments on the SATA Express front since it was first launched on 9-series motherboards back in April 2014. Nevertheless, thanks to storage experts ASMedia - which is a subsidiary of ASUS - we do have a pretty neat SATA Express storage device in the form of the Hyper Express enclosure. We figured that it would be interesting to show you this high-speed interface was capable of on this Z170 HD3 DDR3 motherboard.
The unit that ASUS provided us came packed with two Kingston SSDNow mS200 120GB mSATA solid state drives. These are based on the LSI SandForce SF-2241 controller and are rated at an impressive 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write speeds. Now this is not a review of this device, since this is still a pre-production product and you will not be able to buy one pre-assembled with SSDs inside. We just want to show you a little bit of what SATA Express is capable of.
As you have probably know, most current SATA 6Gb/s devices struggle to get anywhere near that interface's theoretical 750MB/s limit. Due to overhead you are realistically looking at real-life transfer rates of up to about 550 to 575MB/s. By comparison, at the moment all 9-series chipsets seem to be limited to a 10GB/s interface that tops out at about 1GB/s of bandwidth, but we will eventually see SATA Express 16Gb/s implementations capable of supporting transfer rates of up to 2GB/s.
With all of this in mind, let's take a peak at the results.
As you can see above, a modern solid state drive is capable of about 535-550MB/s. Often this is not a controller limitation, but an interface one. If you were to combine one of these modern SATA controllers with a faster interface, the results could be way above SATA 3's limits. That is what SATA-Express is promising to do. Not only do you get up to 1GB/s of bandwidth but there is a built-in backward compatibility with current SATA devices.
With the Hyper Express enclosure, we were able to get very close to the 740MB/s mark. This is a limitation with this configuration of the pre-production Hyper Express, but it at least gives a small glimpse at what we can expect from future SATA Express devices...if there ever are any. We are still hopeful that sometime in the (hopefully) not too distance future there will be devices that are fully capable of utilizing this interface's 1GB/s of bandwidth.
Feature Testing: SATA Express Results
Aside from the fact that it is included on basically every Z170 motherboard, there has basically been zero new developments on the SATA Express front since it was first launched on 9-series motherboards back in April 2014. Nevertheless, thanks to storage experts ASMedia - which is a subsidiary of ASUS - we do have a pretty neat SATA Express storage device in the form of the Hyper Express enclosure. We figured that it would be interesting to show you this high-speed interface was capable of on this Z170 HD3 DDR3 motherboard.
The unit that ASUS provided us came packed with two Kingston SSDNow mS200 120GB mSATA solid state drives. These are based on the LSI SandForce SF-2241 controller and are rated at an impressive 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write speeds. Now this is not a review of this device, since this is still a pre-production product and you will not be able to buy one pre-assembled with SSDs inside. We just want to show you a little bit of what SATA Express is capable of.
As you have probably know, most current SATA 6Gb/s devices struggle to get anywhere near that interface's theoretical 750MB/s limit. Due to overhead you are realistically looking at real-life transfer rates of up to about 550 to 575MB/s. By comparison, at the moment all 9-series chipsets seem to be limited to a 10GB/s interface that tops out at about 1GB/s of bandwidth, but we will eventually see SATA Express 16Gb/s implementations capable of supporting transfer rates of up to 2GB/s.
With all of this in mind, let's take a peak at the results.
As you can see above, a modern solid state drive is capable of about 535-550MB/s. Often this is not a controller limitation, but an interface one. If you were to combine one of these modern SATA controllers with a faster interface, the results could be way above SATA 3's limits. That is what SATA-Express is promising to do. Not only do you get up to 1GB/s of bandwidth but there is a built-in backward compatibility with current SATA devices.
With the Hyper Express enclosure, we were able to get very close to the 740MB/s mark. This is a limitation with this configuration of the pre-production Hyper Express, but it at least gives a small glimpse at what we can expect from future SATA Express devices...if there ever are any. We are still hopeful that sometime in the (hopefully) not too distance future there will be devices that are fully capable of utilizing this interface's 1GB/s of bandwidth.
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