[HN Gopher] Fast PCIe 5.0 SSD prototype hits sequential read spe...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Fast PCIe 5.0 SSD prototype hits sequential read speeds of 14,000
       MB/s
        
       Author : elorant
       Score  : 61 points
       Date   : 2021-09-25 17:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.notebookcheck.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.notebookcheck.net)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | nynx wrote:
       | It looks like this isn't as fast as the theoretical top PCIe 4.0
       | performance?
        
         | magicalhippo wrote:
         | M.2 slots are x4, and going by the table on Wikipedia[1], that
         | equates to about 7.8GB/s for PCIe 4.0.
         | 
         | Of course x8 could do it, but that would be awkward.
         | 
         | From the table we can also see the prototype SSD hitting nearly
         | 90% of the 5.0 max speed.
         | 
         | [1]:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#History_and_revisi...
        
           | wtallis wrote:
           | M.2 is no longer used for enterprise drives like this. This
           | prototype and the current model it's being compared against
           | are 2.5" drives using the U.3 connector, and the power
           | consumption is well beyond what the small M.2 form factor can
           | handle. But you're correct that it's a PCIe x4 link, and
           | that's what determines how much performance the rest of the
           | SSD is designed to provide.
        
             | magicalhippo wrote:
             | Good catch, I assumed since it was a site named "noteboot
             | check" that reported on it and they didn't specifically
             | mention enterprise that it would be a high-performance
             | enthusiast-level drive.
        
               | yread wrote:
               | They do all kinds of other stuff nowadays. First they
               | added desktops than smartphones and now they review even
               | vacuum cleaners.
        
       | 10000truths wrote:
       | This article makes no mention of sustained read/write speeds. Any
       | SSD manufacturer can achieve large IOPS in a benchmark that
       | doesn't exhaust the DRAM cache.
        
         | wmf wrote:
         | This is a server SSD so the specs are sustained.
        
         | sekh60 wrote:
         | I really hate how review sites never mention sustained
         | read/write speeds. I don't care if I can burst that much, I
         | need sustained.
        
           | zucker42 wrote:
           | Tom's Hardware and Anandtech both have sustained benchmarks
           | for the SSDs they test. Which review sites are you talking
           | about?
        
             | tyingq wrote:
             | The one linked in this story?
        
               | zamadatix wrote:
               | NotebookCheck doesn't do SSD reviews, this story is under
               | the news portion of the site hence the complete lack of
               | any information you'd find on a review site.
        
       | ksec wrote:
       | The most impressive thing isn't the raw Seq Read speed. But
       | further reduction in latency from 90us to 70us and ~80% increase
       | Random Read IOPS.
       | 
       | PCI-E 6.0 will be ratified in the coming weeks. So we could see a
       | 28GB/s SSD by 2023.
        
         | MrFoof wrote:
         | Latency is what makes Optane impressive.
         | 
         | Queue depth 1 is where you still feel latency. When you read a
         | file... that points to other files to read... that points to
         | other files to read... and so on.
         | 
         | The really staggering comparative example of this is launching
         | something like 20 beefy desktop applications at the same time.
         | Even though it's sequential throughput is only 40% at best of
         | other competitors, it's where Optane blows the absolute doors
         | off everything else.
         | 
         | When SSDs get to sub-10us latency, that's when it's really
         | party time.
        
           | mastax wrote:
           | Yeah, I have a midrange NVMe SSD for my root but I have some
           | Optane 905p drives sitting around. The Sequential write
           | speeds were not impressive, but the latency and IOPS were
           | good. I installed Ubuntu on one and running `apt upgrade` was
           | so incredibly fast it was impressive.
        
       | rektide wrote:
       | dual channel ddr3-1866 is 14900MB/s, only a little faster.
        
         | rasz wrote:
         | Ram still has 3-4 orders of magnitude faster access time.
        
           | rektide wrote:
           | the fl6 low latency high endurance drive they mentioned here
           | tries to shave off most of an order of magnitude off the
           | access time.
        
         | est31 wrote:
         | Yeah but RAM has next to no wear while SSDs have quite a lot of
         | it.
        
           | rektide wrote:
           | the fl6 low latency high endurance drive they mentioned here
           | has 60drive writes per day (DWPD), which is not too shabby.
        
             | rasz wrote:
             | So a cutting edge SLC has ~60K write cycles now. Good to
             | know.
        
         | ac29 wrote:
         | Presumably many if not most systems with PCIe5 will also have
         | DDR5 though, so thats an odd comparison.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-09-25 23:01 UTC)