Industry Expert Blogs

We talk here a lot about “PCI Express Everywhere” and yesterday’s release of SATA Express by the SATA-IO group formalizes PCI Express as the successor to SATA, so now PCI Express really is in your disks.  Okay, Okay, mostly in your square (solid state) disks – though I’ve heard talk from a few rotating media people that they might build some PCIe-based magnetic disk drives too.  This news won’t be a surprise to many folks however, especially those who’ve heard me talk at PCI-SIG Devcons over the last year or so.

Keeping down the costs of cables for interfaces like SATA Express was one of the prime motivators behind the SRIS (Separate Refclk Independent SSC) ECN released by PCI-SIG back in January.  SRIS extends PCIe to support Spread Spectrum Clocking even when the two link partners do NOT share a common reference clock - which they do in typical PC add-in cards.  This allows cables like PCI-SIG’s own OcuLink or the SATA Express cable to avoid carrying and shielding a jitter-critical clock signal across them.

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