Nowadays, storage devices have been widely installed in various mobile devices, laptops, and large-scale data centers, and People's Daily life has been inseparable. As the demand for storage efficiency continues to rise, most engineers are shifting their focus from traditional mechanical disk solutions to better SOLID-state disk solutions. Reliable Solid-State Drives, with extremely low bit error rates, are more tolerant and durable of extreme temperatures inside data centers. Solid-state drives last for many years and are designed for applications where hard disk usage is high.
The key market segments for SSDS are divided into three categories: 1) Consumer SSDs used in mobile devices and tablets; 2) Customer solid-state drives used in laptops and PCs; 3) Enterprise Solid-state drives for enterprise computing platforms such as hyper-scale computing and data centers. The most common connectors in solid-state drives include SATA, M.2, and PCIe card connectors.
Enterprise SSDs have a variety of interfaces. The hard disk interface determines how many SSDs a server chassis can hold, their data transfer rate, and how long it takes to replace them without shutting down the entire system. Proper interface design is the result of thorough research combined with considerable expertise.
DiskMFR has designed a variety of interfaces to meet your needs, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. However, the most common types are box (SAS, SATA, and U.2) and card (PCI-based AIC and M.2). The same SSD has different performance levels depending on its shape.
▮ COMMON INTERFACE
Value for money – SATA
SATA is considered one of the earliest enterprise solid-state drives that cost less than comparable products. The drive comes in 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch boxes and has a bandwidth of 6GT/s.
Faster and more reliable – SAS
SAS solid-state drives have higher data transfer rates, support dual-port operation, and are more reliable in error correction, data integrity, and high signal quality. The hard disks are mainly used in enterprise servers and storage arrays that require high availability and I/O capabilities.
Miniaturized design – U.2
U.2, also known as SFF8639, is the most commonly used interface design. The design is boxed and supports 4-channel PCIe ports as well as SATA and SAS ports. It consumes 20 watts of power, is pluggable, and supports redundant storage, such as JBOD/JBOF. Up to 24, U.2 SOLID state drives are supported in a 2U server.
Powerful interface — AIC (Expansion card)
The expansion card is card-shaped and connects to a PCIe card slot on the server. It supports only Solid-State drives (SSDs) with PCIe ports. Unlike the U.2, the hard disk cannot be pluggable with power on but supports more than four PCIe channels.
Compact form factor — M.2
Solid-state drives (SSDs) are mainly used in data centers. The interface is more compact than any other hard drive. It uses PCIe or SATA communication. Amphenol ICC’s U.2 can achieve 4th and 5th generation PCIe performance if used as an enterprise SSD. Similarly, 3/4 generation PCIe and m.2 provide 16GT/s performance, and 24 GB SAS provides higher bandwidth.
▮ NEXT-GEN Solid-State Drives (SSDs)
Solid-state drive designs are evolving all the time to keep up with higher and higher application requirements. Amphenol ICC is always one step ahead in developing the next generation of products, from its predecessors to its current products. Early solid-state drives used SAS 2.0/3.0 standards, while future interfaces will be based on SAS 4.0 and other advanced standards. Similarly, moving from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0 will meet the requirements of 4th and 5th-generation SSDs.
PCIe 4.0 & 5.0
The EDSFF and NGSFF SSDs are designed to meet the requirements of storage servers and flash storage arrays running the 4th and 5th generation PCIe/NVMe storage protocols. The design is pluggable and has a dual-port interface to support redundancy, which is an effective replacement for M.2 in front-end service storage applications. EDSFF’s interface design supports 12.5mm slot arrays, while NGSFF SSDS can form 11mm slot arrays in Smaller Spaces. Both can be adjusted according to the heat dissipation requirements. EDSFF is designed to support three standard SSD profiles: 1U long, 1U short, and 3 “for different usage modes.
24G SAS
The high data transfer rate of 24 GB SAS makes it the preferred choice for future mission-critical storage applications. SAS 4.0 has a transfer speed of 24GT/s, which is comparable to the latest NVMe/PCIe SSD interfaces, and speed performance is comparable to NVMe SSDs.
The next generation of Amphenol ICC has a wide variety of connectors that support the next generation of SSDs with the above interface design. Our SAS 4.0 connector supports 24 GB SAS solid-state drives and the Cool Edge connector meets the PCIe standard.
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