Solid State Drive - PCI-E

The PCI-e solid-state drives are high-speed expansion cards that facilitate the attachment of peripherals to a computer. Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI-e) is a serial expansion bus standard. There are different sizes of PCI-e slots which are dictated by the total sum of bidirectional lanes at the slot. The PCI-e standard acts as the data transport layer in add-in cards and graphics cards.

PCI-e SSD storage is just another alternative to server-side flash deployment. Using PCI-e SSDs directly introduces flash on the server motherboard which means that a device connects to the host via a non-shared serial link. It will, therefore, eliminate bus sharing between devices. The PCI-e interface helps reduce latency and enhances the data transfer speed.

Features of PCI-e SSD Cards

Generally, PCI-e SSD card has a far better performance compared to SATA SSDs and SAS SSDs as well as the fibre channel solid-state drives. Some of the most notable versions of the PCI-e standard are the PCI-e 3.0 released back in November of 2010 and PCI-e 4.0 released back in 2017. PCI-e 4.0 offers a two-fold increase in bandwidth compared to the PCI-e 3.0 revision. The PCI-e 5.0 was released in 2019 with even greater bandwidth to support faster and efficient performance.

Other standards released by the PCI-SIG are the NVMe (non-volatile memory express). NVMe delivers a highly optimized set of commands for easier accessing of PCI-e SSDs. NVMe is all about exploiting parallelism in PCI-e to enhance performance.

Yet another interface is the M.2 SSDs which is a smaller form factor that is designed for expansion cards that are mounted internally in high-performance workstations and servers. It's a replacement to the mSATA and carries four lanes of bandwidth of the PCI-e 3.0 standard.

We have the following wide range of storage capacities for the PCI-e SSDs to meet all your needs. The capacity options we have here at AllHDD are: 100GB, 240GB, 250GB, 256GB, 280GB, 320GB, 365GB, 375GB, 380GB, 400GB, 480GB, 500GB, 512GB, 750GB, 785GB, 800GB, 960GB, 1TB, 1.2TB, 1.27TB, 1.3TB, 1.5TB, 1.6TB, 1.75TB, 1.79TB, 1.86TB, 1.92TB, 2TB, 2.6TB, 3TB, 3.2TB, 3.5TB, 3.84TB, 4TB, 6.4TB, 7.68TB, 8TB, 11TB, 12.8TB, and 15.36TB.

Overall, the lower latency allows PCI-e and NVMe SSDs to provide fast response times in processing and handling large workloads such as those associated with data warehousing and transaction processing. One of the best applications of PCI-e flash is in data centers where read and write access is in microseconds and is able to meet input/output (I/O) requirements. PCI-e SSDs help in surpassing the bottlenecks that are linked with the use of SAS and SATA SSDs especially in guaranteeing performance in frequent file transfer scenarios. The total sum of PCI-e lanes in an SSD determines the effective data transfer speeds. For example, a 16-lane PCI-e 3.0 device will easily achieve 32 Gbps transfer speeds.

Some of the drawbacks associated with the PCI-e SSDs are the prohibitive costs and high power consumption that leads to shorter battery life.