A coalition of storage and server vendors today announced they are working together to advance the benefits of Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) storage drives through standardization.
Included in the SSD Form Factor Working Group are “promoter members” Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, IBM and Intel as well as “contributor members” Amphenol, Emulex, Fusion-io, IDT, Marvel Semiconductor, Micron Technology, Molex, PLX, QLogic, STEC, SandForce and Smart Modular Technology.
Conspicuous by its absence from the group, however, are Hewlett-Packard (the world's largest manufacturer of servers and mobile PCs, the two major products in which SSDs can be found) Samsung, Toshiba and Apple, which recently launched its SSD-based MacBook Air.
The Working Group aims to make PCIe-based implementations of SSD technology a standard that can be applied across all server and storage devices. As such the Working Group is proposing a new type of connector which will work with SAS, SATA, and PCIe 3 so that customers will not need multiple connectors. The coalition is also supporting hot-plug capability and proposing that the drives use the standard 2.5-inch drive form factor for the new PCIe SSDs.
