SSD Interfaces and Performance Effects

By Cadence

February 3, 2010

IDC’s Research Director John Rydning and Micron’s Director of SSD Marketing Justin Sykes tackled the merging abilities of fast enterprise-class SSDs and evolving disk interface standards, particularly SATA 6G (also called SATA 6.0) and USB 3.0, while speaking on a panel about the technology of storage during the Storage Visions 2010 conference held early this year in Las Vegas. Rydning spoke first and he compared and contrasted two new external disk-interface standards, namely USB 3.0 and eSATA 6.0. These standard disk interfaces improve on their predecessors. USB 3.0 maximum data rates are 3.2 to 4.8 Gbps versus USB 2.0’s 480 Mbps—a 6.7x to 10x boost in theoretical I/O performance. SATA 6.0 and eSATA 6.0 essentially double the theoretical maximum data rate of SATA 3.0 and eSATA 3.0 from 3 Gbps to 6 GBps. Consequently the new SATA 6.0 and eSATA 6.0 interfaces are theoretically faster than the new USB 3.0 interface just as SATA 3.0 and eSATA 3.0 are faster than USB 2.0.