By PURPLELEC | 13 December 2024 | 0 Comments
What is PCIe® Gen 4 for SSDs, and how does it compare to Gen 3 and Gen 5?
Compared with traditional hard disks (HDD), solid-state drives (SSDs) can significantly improve computer startup speed, application running efficiency, and file transfer speeds. In data center environments, SSDs also perform well, accelerating server data storage and access, thereby accelerating the processing of data-intensive workloads such as data analysis and online transactions. In order to further improve the performance of SSD, PCIe (Peripheral Components Interconnect Express) is widely used as a high-speed computer expansion bus.
PCIe is an interface that connects peripheral components such as storage, graphics cards, and memory to the motherboard. Most of the mainstream desktops, laptops and servers currently on the market support PCIe Gen 4 or 4.0 SSD, which is the fourth generation of PCIe technology and its data transfer rate is twice that of PCIe 3.0. The new generation of PCIe 5.0 SSD has been launched, and its data transfer speed is twice that of Gen 4 and four times that of Gen 3.
The difference between PCIe Gen 4, Gen 3 and Gen 5 mainly lies in the data transfer rate. Each new version of PCIe is twice as fast as the previous version. Specifically, the data transfer rate of PCIe 3.0 is 1GB per channel, while PCIe 4.0 doubles to 2GB per channel, and PCIe 5.0 reaches 4GB per channel. The PCIe slots on the motherboard are available in five configurations: x1, x2, x4, x8 and x16, representing the number of available lanes. For example, a four-lane PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD can theoretically provide nearly 8GB/s throughput.
In addition, PCIe SSD using NVMe® protocol has significant advantages over SATA SSD. The SATA interface was originally designed for HDDs and will limit the performance of SSDs. NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is specially designed for PCIe SSD and can achieve faster data transfer rates. PCIe-based NVMe SSDs also reduce latency and increase input/output operations per second (IOPS), making them ideal for databases and other data-intensive, compute-intensive and graphics-intensive applications.
Looking to the future, PCIe Gen 5 SSD represents the future development trend. Hardware manufacturers have begun shipping desktop computers and servers equipped with next-generation chips and PCIe 5.0 motherboards. However, the popularity of PCIe 5.0 SSD also faces some challenges, such as laptop computer heat dissipation and power consumption issues. However, these issues are expected to be resolved in the future, with laptop vendors expected to start selling laptops equipped with PCIe Gen 5 SSDs by the end of 2024.
Leave a Reply
Your email address will not be published.Required fields are marked. *