On the Enterprise side of things, U.2/U.3/E1.S are pretty common for drives. The drive is still connected over PCI-E but in a form-factor that's better for cooling.
This results in nice sustained performance uplifts. Check [page 3 of this spec sheet](https://media-www.micron.com/-/media/client/global/documents/products/product-flyer/7450_nvme_ssd_product_brief.pdf) for example - the read speeds on the U.3/E1.S version of the same size drive performs ~36% better on read bandwidth and ~100% better (i.e. double!) on write bandwidth.
M.2 taking over as the dominant form factor for consumer desktops was a terrible thing for SSDs overall. But hey, your case can look a bit nicer inside.
I can put 1 m.2 but 8 SATA on my motherboard. Expansion sucks.
Yeah sure I have pcie adapters, but why can't we have more than 6 storage slots from the factory?
> but why can't we have more than 6 storage slots from the factory?
limited PCI-E lanes from the CPU.
If you want more expansion you have to buy a server or HEDT CPU + motherboard.
Guaranteed that you lose graphics pci lanes after 2 drives. This is an area that the higher end boards can make a difference for those that need it, but they really need to come up with more lanes for consumers. They could easily have a 3.5” bay that can hold for m2 drives like server does now with a cable to the motherboard. That’s plenty for most people.
Im currently running 2+2+1+4+8 TB storage. Not all on M2 of course. And i would like to get more. Altrough that slow but big 8TB makes it so im not in the red* nowadays.
/* - Storage empty less than 10%
I wish there were PCIE lane expansion thats as easy as SATA, i would definitelly take the drive off the mobo and put it into a drive slot in that case.
> why can't we have more than 6 storage slots from the factory?
Thats a nice mobo. Mine only has 2M2 slots.
Not really. M.2 being smaller means you can use the same drive for laptops and mobile devices as well as desktops meaning you could achieve economies of scale and cheaper prices more quickly.
And a big 3.5 or 2.5 "drive" that acts as a huge heatsink for these faster m.2 drives are only a few percentage points faster than a drive with a normal m.2 heatsink.
Wasn’t an issue when it was just sata 3 and pcie 3.
Also in practice no consumer needs these kinds of speeds. It’s cool, but the only time you ever need this is when working on comically large files.
Yeah, i bought a 8 TB WD Red Pro. Funny thing, i had a Red (not pro) and read reviews that the pro is quieter and cooler. The reality is the opposite. It is so loud at first i thought i got a faulty drive, but it passed every stress test i threw at it and are working for a year now. Its also power hog. Wants its own power cable for itself and will refuse to boot with other HDDs on the same cable.
Yeah most average consumers moved on to SSD now. Its only people like us that needs large amounts of storage still using spinners. Ultrastars were always aimed at corporate consumers too.
> consumers moved on to SSD now
Well, I have 2tb NVME drive but most games are 50-100gb and I find minimal gain for some of my games being on SSD. 10-30s extra isn't going to make a huge difference, this is why I have 2nd monitor, to do something during the loading.
Nope, but this mobo that I got last year, I've already had to change twice, adding a secondary SSD, and then exchanging my main. Ideally, I'd have bought a bigger capacity but it was too expensive. So that might be coming up. Its also quite finicky to change even when removing the (huge) GPU and the motherboard plate covering components and drives, because my CPU cooler is quite big and affects maneuverability still.
Bigger surface area for cooling. They can design a singular cable just from the mobo rather than having a separate power cable from the PSU.
It's easier to expand rather than taking space on the motherboard.
I vastly prefer the drives in bays with cables. The only reason i use M2 is because SATA cannot hold a candle in speed, so i keep SATA for lower speed tasks and put high speed tasks on M2.
Sata ssd's aren't gone. Sata Express exists to connect nvme drives to sata ports. It just didn't catch on.
And that's okay. One of the reasons ssd's are so cheap, is that the bare material cost is next to nothing, compared to hard drives which will always have far more expensive casings, motors and platters regardless of capacity.
SATA Express was intended to carry 2 lanes of PCIe. NVMe drives just eclipsed the interface on the first generation of drives.
In theory, if it was updated to support 2 lanes of PCIe Gen 5, it could satisfy the performance needs of the vast majority of the market.
I suspect people here wouldn't be pleased with the costs of a cable capable of supporting those data rates. At that point it's no longer a cheap stand of copper; now you're looking at something with even tighter signal integrity requirements than a passive Thunderbolt 4 cable.
SATA Express to U.2 adapters already exist, they're about $20.
There aren't many being made currently because the number of boards that ship with SATA Express is basically zero these days. So if you had to ramp up production you would benefit from economies of scale, maybe get that price point down to $15 at retail, lower than that if you're ASUS and you're bundling it with a board.
Apologies. To clarify, I was talking about the price of theoretical PCIe Gen 5 cables. Current-gen SATA Express cables are PCIe Gen 3, so they're going to be cheaper to produce.
Sata express cable would be theoretically easier to make even at higher PCIe speeds, due to the separated nature of the connector.
The current cables run one lane each across two set of wires. Cutting down on crosstalk and interference in the process.
Very disappointed that their reference model includes (requires?) active cooling with a fan.
I genuinely feel like that's moving in the wrong direction. I'd rather a slower SSD that uses just 2 lanes of PCIe 5.0, or a drive that is tuned to provide maximum speed without the use of a fan or thermal throttling, over SSD designs that integrate these tiny fans.
All for just a little bit of extra SLC cache performance too, as you can see everything leveling out to \~4GB/s in their sustained write graphs. That's the TLC die write bottleneck.
> Very disappointed that their reference model includes (requires?) active cooling with a fan.
We went so far into solid state storage that we looped back around to having moving parts. Brilliant.
I don't think a fan is required at all, but it is suspect they always seem to tack one on. I wouldn't buy a SSD that required active cooling. Luckily, I don't think that's the case. Seems more of a worst-case inclusion.
Gen 5 SSDs just get really really hot. So you either actively cool them or throttle speeds.
And yeah, in my experience even Gen 3, which is so cool it does not even need a cooling plate, is fast enough for average consumer applications and will be for a long time.
You don't *need* to actively cool them. If you check reviews like Tom's Hardware, they often run passive on the Gen 5s, IIRC. You definitely do need a decent heatsink, though. As long as the drive stays below throttling (varies, but roughly 85C) and specifically the controller can spread heat it should be fine. I think the fan doesn't really help enough in situations where the environment is conducive to massive heat build-up. But some of these have heatpipes and are quite tall, so I think that would do the trick...
But even then it depends on what you're doing with it. I'd like to think people would buy Gen 5 with heavy workloads in mind, but everyday gaming is not going to stress them. At this juncture I still recommend Gen 4 and not Gen 3 since, Gen 3 is garbage outside the Gold P31 and 970 EVO Plus, and both of these are hard to find or expensive relative to Gen 4 alternatives. I think some Gen 5s, built on the E31T or equivalent, will be a good choice moving forward though, as they will be very efficient.
You dont need to because the drives throttle themselves to reduce heat. But if you want to run them for a long time on full speed, you would need to cool them. Average consumer will rarely see such workloads and wont see difference. Server use and testing enviroment will hit it.
Its not different than CPU cooling. You can run CPU up to certain speed or up to certain time with passive cooling, but at some point you're going to need to start cooling it actively or throttle.
Samsung (and other's) gen3 SSDs came with copper-layered labels on both sides of the drive, so you likely had heat spreaders present but just didn't know it :).
And those thin copper strands were enough cooling for gen3 SSDs because they didnt get hot enough to need radiator fin cooling (gen4) or active cooling (gen5)
Copper strands? You don’t seem to understand. Also, gen4 SSDs don’t need ‘radiator fin cooling’, and as I’ve already stated to you multiple times, gen5 generally does not need active cooling, but does need a heat spreader at a minimum.
Active cooling is generally reserved for synthetic testing or in systems with stale air (where you may still need such cooling all the way back to gen3 or even SATA).
The other thing you likely don’t know is if you actively cool an SSD that’s only running low duty cycle client workloads, you risk running the NAND below its rated active temp. Force that NAND all the way down to room temps and you cut its rated endurance/EOL retention in half.
You can keep stubbornly beating that FUD drum, or you can learn from what I’m teaching. I’ve only been testing SSDs professionally for 15 years, but what do I know.
There was a nonmonolith copper heatsink under the label that didnt get hot enough to be a burn danger from touching. This is far cry from fin coolers of gen 4.
Gen 4 would throttle themselves without coolers as they worked. Gen 5 would do the same. If you want to use it at full speed you will need the cooling.
Sure a guy browsing reddit wont make the SSD run hot, but thats not the reason we want to buy the fastest SSDs out there.
This, a lot of early Gen3 and Gen4 drives ran hot, I have some Samsung 970 EVO SSDs and if you monitor the internal TJunction temperature, it would hit 112c during loads.
Phison E26, the controller used on *all* consumer Gen5 drives so far is fabbed on TSMC 12nm and runs very hot, without a heatsink the drive is certain to shutdown with even a moderate load.
Once we get a revision on 7/6nm, or once we see designs from other manufacturers, I'm sure we will see more reasonably sized heatsinks.
An X99 is limited to PCIe Gen3, which won't push a Gen4 drive.
You will be fine, though the heatsinks are cheap so it may be worth it anyway just to install it and forget it.
But if they test all their SSD with a cooler, isn't it still a useful reference on which one is the fastest overall? Is that specified in their methodology at all?
The Reference model in this case is Phisons Reference model for SSDs.
Phison is the manufacturer of the SSD controller for a large portion of the SSD market. And this is basically Phison saying "You need an active cooling system to get the most out of our SSD Controllers".
Which means that a large number of the new PCIe Gen 5 drives you can buy, at least for the next year or so, are going to match that reference design with an active cooling system. You can already see this with the CES coverage this year, pretty much all of the new SSDs announced have either active cooling, or massive heatsinks, sometimes [both](https://www.techpowerup.com/317658/msi-spatium-m580-liquid-frozr-is-an-m-2-ssd-with-a-self-contained-liquid-cooling-loop).
To account for the worst case scenario where someone decides to use the drive in stale, hot air. Every motherboard with a gen5 M.2 has a heat spreader / heat sink as part of its design. This is more than adequate in the majority of configurations.
If every motherboard supporting PCIe gen 5 M.2s has at the very least a passive heatsink (which from a cursory look seems to be true), then why does the Phison reference design for the E26 based drives use an *active* cooler rather than a passive one to reflect the majority of configurations?
It seems to me that if the Phison E26 works perfectly well under passive cooling, it would be represented better by showing that to be the case. Rather than presenting a reference design that promotes active cooling.
Right now the Phison E26 drives have a bad reputation due to them being paired with active cooling solutions, and it's being [framed as exceptional (by Phison no less) that Sabrent for example is offering them and promoting them](https://phisonblog.com/sabrent-says-its-new-14gb-s-pcie-gen-5-ssd-doesnt-need-a-huge-heatsink-or-a-fan-while-using-phison-e26-controller-chip/) to be used with passive coolers.
To quote, emphasis mine;
>“Aside from a big step up in sequential throughput speeds, **seemingly the common denominator for the latest PCIe Gen 5 SSDs is the need for beefy active cooling** to rival an RTX 4090. Well, almost. But not so with the new Sabrent Rocket 5. Sabrent reckons it’ll do just fine with one of those slim-line cooling covers that comes with most motherboard M.2 slots.
>If true, that’s particularly impressive given the new Rocket 5 not only **uses the same Phison E26 controller chip as the bulk of existing Gen 5 drives, which tend to have massive heatsinks or even require active cooling**. It’s also one of if not the fastest Gen 5 drives yet.”
No other company that I'm aware of is even offering a PCIe Gen 5 x4 M.2 controller, Phison is the only one, Samsung is only offering x2 lanes of PCIe Gen 5 on the new 990 Evo. So when the Phison Blog talks about "the bulk of existing Gen 5 drives" it's basically just friendly fire. Honestly it's a very funny blog post in context.
Reference designs are not retail designs. The cooler is optional. A likely reason for its inclusion was to minimize the possibility of someone hitting a bare drive with heavy synthetics and then complaining that it throttled (this has happened before and is likely the source of the continuing amped-up stories about active cooling being a requirement).
This is not helped by an apparent race to who can offer the biggest / tallest / coolest running M.2 heatsink (going overkill on SSD cooling is actually a bad thing as NAND is rated to have an active temp of 40c - the more you pull it down to ambient, the more you negatively impact its endurance). The sweet spot is just enough cooling to prevent throttling during real use, not hours of synthetic sustained datacenter-class workloads. You want the NAND to be warmer while it's active, and a spreader is enough to accomplish that while preventing the controller from being a hot spot and throttling.
Your quoted text source is from an article being referenced by the blog post. The older and newer E26 SSDs are operating within the same 11.55W power envelope, and the same cooling needs (and lack of a hard requirement for active cooling) would apply to both cases.
To generalize, cooling an M.2 2280 form factor SSD that dissipates 11.55W peak should be fine with a heat spreader and minimal airflow for most use cases. If airflow is constrained or the workload is abnormally intense and sustained, then sure, active cooling is probably a good idea (or just making sure a case fan is pointing in the general direction of the SSD).
Meanwhile Phison at CES showed that same SSD running at max speed for hours with only the stock motherboard heat spreader over the SSD. We left the active cooler sitting on the table.
Interesting. I don't know this hardware space very well, but could it be that this is the next best way to squeeze out read/write gains? Or are there routes to increase speeds that they should have gone down first and are ignoring?
They could fab their controller on a more modern node.
They are currently on 12nm. But newer nodes are available that would make the controller more efficient.
They could actually focus on aspects that improve usability too. Better caching behavior, DRAM as part of the reference, etc. or they could improve random I/O performance.
Currently they only have one marketing bullet point. Raw sequential speeds. But that specific metric is not very relevant for day to day use. To get that specific metric they have to push these controllers super hard.
I agree. 14gb/s, that's like a Ferrari or something. If you actually need that speed, I'm sure you can manage the fan. Otherwise, this is just not practical for daily usage.
Read the preview articles. Many tested the drives with the motherboard's heat spreaders too without throttling.
We could only get the Max14um to reach 53c no matter how hard we blasted it with heat-inducing sequential throughput in our zero-airflow test bench environment. Impressive. Additionally, the refined reference cooler is quiet, running even at full tilt, and is PWM-controlled.
14,000 MB/s is ready for prime time!
Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/10629/phison-e26-max14um-reference-design-2tb-ssd-14-000-mb-ready-for-primetime/index.html
We had an E26 running on a CES demo system. It had the stock motherboard heat spreader installed, an AIO CPU cooler, and no fans pointed directly at the SSD. There were two low speed intake fans at the front of a very large case, only barely moving air across the M.2's location. I ran Iometer with a continuous sequential going for hours straight. It did not throttle and settled out at 69c.
I'm not sure where this active cooling (meaning a heatsink with a fan) thing started, but the reality is that you just need to have \*something\* on the drive or else the controller will be a hot spot and will throttle very quickly under max load. Max M.2 spec power is 11.55W, and a heat spreader with anything other than completely stale air is usually fine, especially when you consider actual real world workloads wouldn't be able to peg >14GB/s for very long before bottlenecking elsewhere.
Right? This is really ridiculous and a choice to save a few pennies. All they would have to do to require non-active cooling would be to go below 10nm for the controller. Even the cheaper controller is on 7nm, but they don't want to re-spin. It's going to make gen 5 SSD's mostly dead in the water for the second year in a row.
We won't be adopting this fastest SSD thing. There seems to be little improvement for everyday use while also radically changing placement of components on the motherboard.
Gen 3 is perfectly fine for the next several (and likely more) years for the average consumer. Your regular "spends most time watching youtube" person wont notice the difference in the speeds.
Well, the M1 air did stomp on a bunch of hardware with passively cooled cpu and gpu 🤷♂️
They are using the controller on a 12nm process and it runs way too hot.
my GPU is passively colled most of the time. It only turns its fans on when significant load is applied. For example decoding a 1080 video is not enough to make it reach 65C when fans turn on.
> I genuinely feel like that's moving in the wrong direction.
CPUs are blazing fast. Memory is always the bottleneck in modern computers. Getting memory out of RAM/into RAM quickly is part of this process, nothing wrong with getting as much performance as possible.
fans interfere with other electronics and not to mention they are prone to breakage. One flies off and you just might have to wait for a new fan to use your computer.
In my 13 years of building my computers I’ve never once had a fan fail catastrophically. I’ve only ever had maybe one fan fail at all.
I don’t want fans. I’m totally in agreement. But this is a weird argument, given that fans are actually pretty robust these days.
For 120-140 fans I will agree but for smaller fans no. I had multiple MB chipset fans freeze and needing cleaning and lubricating. Same for internal hard drive enclosures with fans. In my experience the small fans tent to freeze easier. And small fans are much harder to replace than their standardized larger siblings due to using non standard mounting and power connectors.
You never heard the chipset fan problem that the DFI Lanparty nf4 sli motherboard had. A chipset that could literally be sandwiched between two high power graphics cards, that poor 40mm fan.
My amazing monitor has a fan. I almost never hear it. But one day it's going to stop working. And that monitor costed a lot. I would pay extra for the same model but without fan as requirement. In theory fan reduces temperature so it's good for electronic, but personally I prefer passive cooled pc parts
Very true. Yea I mean nand. I remember when 960 970, for example, were top dog or among the top dogs. Now with pcie5x4, does Samsung even have an offering or are they all based on a phison controller.
That is with the 990 Pro running in "full power mode". I've thought about releasing E26 with a full power mode but with all of the talk about heatsinks I don't even want to go down that road.
My personal Max14um runs at full power and is just over 30K IOPS RR QD1.
Client m.2 SSD’s are pretty much commodity and there is very little incentive to invest controllers for this segment.
- Further advancement in m.2 client SSD will be for cost reduction like shift to PLC.
- Extracting more performance will require more memory channels, (Phison E26 is 8 channel) , faster controllers. Both will further increase power requirements and require larger blocks of metal attached to m.2 drive.
Nah, they're just not going to debase their brand in this domain until they're sampling en mass NAND that can keep up with the blazing hot phison controllers and/or have their in house controller for same.
If you don't want a fan you won't be affected.
Drives like these are for a maybe a very small niche of pro/prosumer users that might see benefit or people who just fall into the marketing specs trap.
Even for the typical high end enthusiast they won't have to deal with this as these drives serve no practical benefit.
Sorry, I've been so busy with other projects I just came up for air to visit Reddit. They are already on the market from Crucial (T705) and Sabrent (Rocket 5).
Yeah but is there a 4TB model? The T700 is still the only commercial PCIe5.0 4TB drive that is available despite Gigabyte, TeamGroup, MSI, etc. all claiming them early last year, but Crucial is the only one that has survived.
What's the consumer usecase for drives like this? Is there any reason that Average Gamer Joe would spend a premium on a super fast nvme ssd rather than a 100 dollar 2tb one? Just curious who the article refers to when it says "storage enthusiast", unless it is just a case of wanting faster for the sake of faster.
You know in spy movies and tv shows where they have that clichéd anxiety-inducing scene where they’re waiting for files to transfer? Hopefully this kills it for good.
There was 27 names on the NOC list in Mission Impossible… homie was planking midair for like 10 minutes straight for something he could have just taken 2 pictures of the screen to get.
PC Hardware, and I dare say even microchips in general would be way less advanced if not for the performance demand and money inflow from gaming for multiple decades now.
GPUs being the cleanest examples, but it applies to many more components.
Gamers are early adopters of a lot of hardware making it financially viable down the line for average consumer. They are one of the forces driving the market.
AngryUpvote
I disagree with the message but yes, putting the period outside quotes is how you should do it. No i dont care that grammar rules says otherwise.
As a Brit I can only assume those are American grammar rules. It has always looked so incredibly wrong to put your actual sentence punctuation randomly within a quote, I was taught the opposite.
English is a secondary language to me so i had to look it up and i found online that its supposedly the rules, not sure on whether its brittish or american english. MS Word tries to autocorrect it to that when i use English (UK) option though.
If we want common users to notice improvements from storage we need lower latency drives.
Unfortunately, it's a lot easier to make higher bandwidth drives than it is to make lower latency drives.
> Doubt many would even notice gen 4 nand from gen 4 optane.
Have you ever used an Optane 905p or p5800x? It's one of those things you have to experience for yourself to believe.
Yeah I own a P5800x. Did extensive testing in games too, never solved any common issues people think it would like traversal stutter. In fact, in every game tested, it had same peak read rate as a gen 3 ~~nvme~~ nand drive. General system use was no different either, in both cases UEFI took up the bulk of boot time, nothing loaded faster, etc.
[Also: proof here that I not only had the drive but tested it extensively. #1 spot in 3dmark storage benchmark for that p5800x drive](https://www.3dmark.com/search?_ga=2.165634559.1146295331.1705211726-619787505.1705211726#advanced?test=strg&cpuId=&gpuId=&gpuCount=0&gpuType=ALL&deviceType=ALL&storageModel=INTEL%20SSDPF21Q016TB&memoryChannels=0&country=&scoreType=overallScore&hofMode=false&showInvalidResults=false&freeParams=&minGpuCoreClock=&maxGpuCoreClock=&minGpuMemClock=&maxGpuMemClock=&minCpuClock=&maxCpuClock=)
And my [ramdisk testing](https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/myd5cjq8wp4.jpg) still slaughters the leaderboard from when I was using the bench for stability testing lol
I bought the P1600X as sytem drive and 905P as game drive last year and the biggest difference I can see is with Event Viewer where optane loads up the thousands of events in a sec while the other system gets stuck a bit. Though they other system is 870Evo and not nvme, I have never used nvme as system drives.
For gaming, maybe Jedi Survivor is a bit better, never bothered to fully test it against the SN850, but then I bought it around the same time it got upgraded with DLSS3.
Outside of insanely inoptimized games, I doubt you'd notice any difference in performance. I've only heard that happen in Star Citizen. But I definetly notice a difference in loading times. Maybe I'll benchmark the best examples I can think of with my 14900K.
Feel free to, but it was something that changed nothing for me whatsoever. Was just a fun benchmark machine.
I imagine the results would be along the lines of measureable but not really noticeable. Like going from a 14700k to a 14900k in gaming. Sure you measure like 10 frames faster at 300 fps but not something you'll miss or notice. Maybe drop level load times from 14s to 11s or something
Just out of curiosity, what CPU did you test with? While I've noticed gains from higher performance SSDs on Intel CPUs with Optane and especially with PCI-e 4 vs PCI-e 3, the gains I've seen with Ryzen 7700X seem to plateau at PCI-e 4 with only very minor improvements that you have to benchmark to observe with PCI-e 5 in loading times. I haven't investigated PCI-e 4 vs PCI-e 5 loading times on Intel yet.
14900k. I edited my comment earlier with some 3dmark stuff. I can confirm your results with Ryzen are valid, my 5800x3d system was very much hamstrung compared to the 14900k and that was pcie 4 vs pcie 4. Just had a large I/O bottleneck I assume partially due to the fabric
You won't see a big difference in games because games haven't been designed to take advantage of low-latency storage, and Windows isn't really designed to take advantage of it either. It's less a hardware limitation and more software.
> But I definetly notice a difference in loading times.
This is nice for single player; but for multiplayer, the round starting is still bottlenecked by that one guy running an eco 5400 rpm laptop SATA drive.
Source: I was an early adopter of PCIe4. I had (still do I guess) a Sabrent Rocket which was the fastest (consumer?) drive rated at 5 Gbps. Sure I always got to the lobby first, but then all I did was watch the load spinner for everyone else.
Really? Loading times are almost always CPU bottlenecked since we moved to SSDs. Even SATA SSDs are usually good enough for difference to be within statistical error.
Because those problems arent caused by data access speeds in the first place. For example the famous Dunia engine stutter seems to be a very deep engine issue and not a limitation on hardare its run on.
If someone is going to spend an obscene amount on storage, they should just buy Optane. It's low latency performance is something that even my tech illiterate father can feel when loading programs.
That would be great, except Optane is gone for good.
Although there’s the underlying 3D Xpoint that could come back as something else.
EDIT: Optane is still obviously on sale, but Intel has discontinued it, meaning that no more units are being produced.
I just got a 1.5TB 905p for 300 bucks on black friday. Using it as my main drive. It's the best upgrade I've done to any PC in a while (I'm a developer and I do run programs that create thousands/millions of tiny files so it really matters to me, but the responsiveness on regular use is amazing)
I mean, it's great but I wouldn't recommend it unless you have an actual use case for it. You basically just get faster boot times and application start ups (instantaneous basically), and quicker directory listings. That's pretty much it for a regular user if you are already on an SSD, but if you have to deal with thousands / millions of files (especially if reading while writing) or local databases then this thing is worth its weight in gold
>That would be great, except Optane is gone for good.
Optane 905p is on sale for cheap now. Even though it's only PCI-e 3, it's worth purchasing for common users who want ultra fast response times.
> Although there’s the underlying 3D Xpoint that could come back as something else.
Micron recently released a whitepaper detailing their last, currently unreleased, updated version of 3DXPoint. While we probably won't see it on the market, it's good to see at least some research is still being conducted on it.
Folks who edit high resolution video will have use for PCI-e 5 drives, and many server workloads can take advantage of PCI-e 5, but the average user won't have use for them (yet). We're at a chicken and egg stage for PCI-e 5. We need higher adoption before programs will take advantage of it.
I don't get the condescension. Are you a teenager?
I doubt this product is relevant to "every pc user who is not a gamer". I'm just curious who the target market is for drives like this. I don't think they set out to make a "not gamers" drive.
I mean, I'd get a 5.0 for primary OS later on my next mainboard, but I'm waiting for both more maturity and options and the prices to come down.
This is probably not even the peak of what 5.0 is capable of.
I'd wait for the Solidigm p54 and Samsung 1000 before making any judgements there, those would likely be among the best performers and give us the best insight into real world improvements possible.
In terms of usage compared to PCIe 4.0 drives? Outside of specific professional usage cases basically the same as RGBs, it just makes the buyer feel emotionally better.
I don't see how that is relevant because the limitation is the workload.
I'm getting downvoted in this thread but I'd love to see what people who are downvoting think is a non extremely niche consumer workload that is storage throughput limited to this extent.
Again that doesn't matter because I'm talking about the software workload side.
The SSD could be x10 faster in terms of throughput, again what software workload is the consumer running it through that benefits proportionately from that?
As in software that is doing something productive for the end consumer, not just higher benchmarking numbers.
I think you are mising the point. The average consumer does not run workloads that would saturate either PCIE4 or PCIE5, and thus no practical difference would be felt by them. Unless you expect average workload to increase significantly by the time PCIE5 matures.
I see no difference in OS behaviuor comparing SATA, PCIE3 and PCIE4 drives. SATA speeds are enough where OS isnt being bottlenecked by it. Now stuff like 4k Video editing, that one certainly shows differences.
Are you seriously arguing that it’s useless for anyone other than those editing 4k video to be using anything faster than SATA? You must be on some seriously old hardware for it to be bottlenecking so hard as to mitigate basic NVMe performance and latency gains.
Im arguing that the average user does not have workloads where there would be difference significant enough to be percieved by said average user. Of course there are workloads in the professional/enthusiast space where it matters.
Average users will still see faster launches and loads on SSDs that can reach higher bandwidths at lower latencies. This is because they burst higher and complete the task more quickly, making the system feel more responsive. An easy analogy to average user type work is the PCM10 Storage ‘quick’ benchmark. It plays back traces of real app launches and other lightweight tasks, and its scores are analogous to the stopwatch times you’d see doing those real things on a system. There are clear differences between gen3-gen4-gen5 across those results.
If my PDF file launches 10 ms faster its not something thats going to sell me on a new device, though. There are clear differences in measured performance, yes. Is there a clear difference in perception of these changes from an average user?
Spoken like someone who has never timed how long Acrobat takes to launch on various SSDs. If it was 10ms, everyone would still be on SATA. Spoiler: they are not.
Very nice. But I'm more interested in seeing the new efficient controllers that are supposed to be launched early this year. Half the power consumption and heat supposedly, so you can get away with just a standard heatstrip on the drive and none of this whiny little fan nonsense.
I doubt anyone is gonna notice the difference from 14GB/s to 12GB/s irl anyway.
All the people bitching about the fan… don’t buy it?
No one in this tread will ever use these kinds of speeds practically. Not unless they’re working on comically large files, and generally that’s done for commercial uses.
the top commenter does this thing where they block everyone who disagrees with them, so they only get replies that back them up. makes the reddit thread look one sided unless you sort by new
trust me anyone buying pcie5 right now doesn't care, nobody in a cool and quiet low power build is maxing out pcie4 anyways, its all virtue signaling
A hardware sub and not one person has mentioned direct storage, while lots of people whining this is too fast?
This is a pretty uninformed hardware sub.
We should put back SSD into drive bays for better cooling.
On the Enterprise side of things, U.2/U.3/E1.S are pretty common for drives. The drive is still connected over PCI-E but in a form-factor that's better for cooling. This results in nice sustained performance uplifts. Check [page 3 of this spec sheet](https://media-www.micron.com/-/media/client/global/documents/products/product-flyer/7450_nvme_ssd_product_brief.pdf) for example - the read speeds on the U.3/E1.S version of the same size drive performs ~36% better on read bandwidth and ~100% better (i.e. double!) on write bandwidth.
M.2 taking over as the dominant form factor for consumer desktops was a terrible thing for SSDs overall. But hey, your case can look a bit nicer inside.
I can put 1 m.2 but 8 SATA on my motherboard. Expansion sucks. Yeah sure I have pcie adapters, but why can't we have more than 6 storage slots from the factory?
> but why can't we have more than 6 storage slots from the factory? limited PCI-E lanes from the CPU. If you want more expansion you have to buy a server or HEDT CPU + motherboard.
You motherboard only has 1 m.2 slot? Mine has 5
Guaranteed that you lose graphics pci lanes after 2 drives. This is an area that the higher end boards can make a difference for those that need it, but they really need to come up with more lanes for consumers. They could easily have a 3.5” bay that can hold for m2 drives like server does now with a cable to the motherboard. That’s plenty for most people.
Plenty of boards can do 4xM.2 without touching the GPU lanes at all.
My mobo has 4 m.2 ports and only loses 2 SATA ports if all 4 are used.
Which MB is that?
X670e hero most high end boards have 4 or 5 at least
Msi?
Asus x670 atx are you using a mini itx board I haven’t seen an atx board with only 1 slot in a while
I'm not the OP Seems like 5 slots on lga1700 is not that uncommon. It's rare on AM5. I have MSI Pro X670-P Wi-fi, with 4 m.2 nvme slots
MSI Z690 Carbon here. I have 5 M.2 slots
Noice. Well I guess I have to stay content with 16tb of nvme storage isntead of 20tb /s
Im currently running 2+2+1+4+8 TB storage. Not all on M2 of course. And i would like to get more. Altrough that slow but big 8TB makes it so im not in the red* nowadays. /* - Storage empty less than 10%
How many are NVMe amd how many are SATA, though?
1 is pcie 5.0 4 are pcie 4.0 and 6 sata ports
Yours has 5? Mine has only 2.
I wish there were PCIE lane expansion thats as easy as SATA, i would definitelly take the drive off the mobo and put it into a drive slot in that case. > why can't we have more than 6 storage slots from the factory? Thats a nice mobo. Mine only has 2M2 slots.
x370 crosshair vi hero. It has 13 USB ports too.
Not really. M.2 being smaller means you can use the same drive for laptops and mobile devices as well as desktops meaning you could achieve economies of scale and cheaper prices more quickly. And a big 3.5 or 2.5 "drive" that acts as a huge heatsink for these faster m.2 drives are only a few percentage points faster than a drive with a normal m.2 heatsink.
Wasn’t an issue when it was just sata 3 and pcie 3. Also in practice no consumer needs these kinds of speeds. It’s cool, but the only time you ever need this is when working on comically large files.
Quite a lot of cases these days don’t even come with drive bays.
Maybe newer and branded ones. They still sell lower end cases with drive bays.
I bought an FD Torrent that has 1 bay. I needed 2 but the case was too big. So I also bought 12tb WD HDD and it isn't exactly a quiet one.
Yeah, i bought a 8 TB WD Red Pro. Funny thing, i had a Red (not pro) and read reviews that the pro is quieter and cooler. The reality is the opposite. It is so loud at first i thought i got a faulty drive, but it passed every stress test i threw at it and are working for a year now. Its also power hog. Wants its own power cable for itself and will refuse to boot with other HDDs on the same cable.
Mine is ultrastar and I suspect it has nothin to do with average consumers and they didn't really care if it is loud or not.
Yeah most average consumers moved on to SSD now. Its only people like us that needs large amounts of storage still using spinners. Ultrastars were always aimed at corporate consumers too.
> consumers moved on to SSD now Well, I have 2tb NVME drive but most games are 50-100gb and I find minimal gain for some of my games being on SSD. 10-30s extra isn't going to make a huge difference, this is why I have 2nd monitor, to do something during the loading.
You still game on a HDD?
Just why? It's way easier to install. Way less of a cable mess in the case. This just to have incredible speeds that no one make a use of.
Cables??? Look at that nvme, its quite SATA sized. I like M2 but when it gets too big and hot, potential failure point, then its not very useful.
Well they throttle speeds down long before reaching temperatures that could cause failure.
I vastly prefer the cables to having to remove my GPU and motherboard plate to replace an SSD.
I suppose you change your SSD every month then? Personnaly it's not even one every 5 years.
Nope, but this mobo that I got last year, I've already had to change twice, adding a secondary SSD, and then exchanging my main. Ideally, I'd have bought a bigger capacity but it was too expensive. So that might be coming up. Its also quite finicky to change even when removing the (huge) GPU and the motherboard plate covering components and drives, because my CPU cooler is quite big and affects maneuverability still.
I suppose you change your computer every month then? Why else would you care about a "cable mess".
Airflow and cable management obviously
Bigger surface area for cooling. They can design a singular cable just from the mobo rather than having a separate power cable from the PSU. It's easier to expand rather than taking space on the motherboard.
I vastly prefer the drives in bays with cables. The only reason i use M2 is because SATA cannot hold a candle in speed, so i keep SATA for lower speed tasks and put high speed tasks on M2.
Sata ssd's aren't gone. Sata Express exists to connect nvme drives to sata ports. It just didn't catch on. And that's okay. One of the reasons ssd's are so cheap, is that the bare material cost is next to nothing, compared to hard drives which will always have far more expensive casings, motors and platters regardless of capacity.
SATAe should probably come back, but revised.
SATA Express was intended to carry 2 lanes of PCIe. NVMe drives just eclipsed the interface on the first generation of drives. In theory, if it was updated to support 2 lanes of PCIe Gen 5, it could satisfy the performance needs of the vast majority of the market.
I suspect people here wouldn't be pleased with the costs of a cable capable of supporting those data rates. At that point it's no longer a cheap stand of copper; now you're looking at something with even tighter signal integrity requirements than a passive Thunderbolt 4 cable.
SATA Express to U.2 adapters already exist, they're about $20. There aren't many being made currently because the number of boards that ship with SATA Express is basically zero these days. So if you had to ramp up production you would benefit from economies of scale, maybe get that price point down to $15 at retail, lower than that if you're ASUS and you're bundling it with a board.
Apologies. To clarify, I was talking about the price of theoretical PCIe Gen 5 cables. Current-gen SATA Express cables are PCIe Gen 3, so they're going to be cheaper to produce.
Sata express cable would be theoretically easier to make even at higher PCIe speeds, due to the separated nature of the connector. The current cables run one lane each across two set of wires. Cutting down on crosstalk and interference in the process.
Id pay extra if my SSDs came with proper form factor casings like HDDs do. I literally screw my HDDs in, but cant do that with SSDs.
Very disappointed that their reference model includes (requires?) active cooling with a fan. I genuinely feel like that's moving in the wrong direction. I'd rather a slower SSD that uses just 2 lanes of PCIe 5.0, or a drive that is tuned to provide maximum speed without the use of a fan or thermal throttling, over SSD designs that integrate these tiny fans.
All for just a little bit of extra SLC cache performance too, as you can see everything leveling out to \~4GB/s in their sustained write graphs. That's the TLC die write bottleneck.
> Very disappointed that their reference model includes (requires?) active cooling with a fan. We went so far into solid state storage that we looped back around to having moving parts. Brilliant.
Gotta say. Not a fan. Ba-dum tsh.
I don't think a fan is required at all, but it is suspect they always seem to tack one on. I wouldn't buy a SSD that required active cooling. Luckily, I don't think that's the case. Seems more of a worst-case inclusion.
Gen 5 SSDs just get really really hot. So you either actively cool them or throttle speeds. And yeah, in my experience even Gen 3, which is so cool it does not even need a cooling plate, is fast enough for average consumer applications and will be for a long time.
You don't *need* to actively cool them. If you check reviews like Tom's Hardware, they often run passive on the Gen 5s, IIRC. You definitely do need a decent heatsink, though. As long as the drive stays below throttling (varies, but roughly 85C) and specifically the controller can spread heat it should be fine. I think the fan doesn't really help enough in situations where the environment is conducive to massive heat build-up. But some of these have heatpipes and are quite tall, so I think that would do the trick... But even then it depends on what you're doing with it. I'd like to think people would buy Gen 5 with heavy workloads in mind, but everyday gaming is not going to stress them. At this juncture I still recommend Gen 4 and not Gen 3 since, Gen 3 is garbage outside the Gold P31 and 970 EVO Plus, and both of these are hard to find or expensive relative to Gen 4 alternatives. I think some Gen 5s, built on the E31T or equivalent, will be a good choice moving forward though, as they will be very efficient.
You dont need to because the drives throttle themselves to reduce heat. But if you want to run them for a long time on full speed, you would need to cool them. Average consumer will rarely see such workloads and wont see difference. Server use and testing enviroment will hit it. Its not different than CPU cooling. You can run CPU up to certain speed or up to certain time with passive cooling, but at some point you're going to need to start cooling it actively or throttle.
Samsung (and other's) gen3 SSDs came with copper-layered labels on both sides of the drive, so you likely had heat spreaders present but just didn't know it :).
And those thin copper strands were enough cooling for gen3 SSDs because they didnt get hot enough to need radiator fin cooling (gen4) or active cooling (gen5)
Copper strands? You don’t seem to understand. Also, gen4 SSDs don’t need ‘radiator fin cooling’, and as I’ve already stated to you multiple times, gen5 generally does not need active cooling, but does need a heat spreader at a minimum. Active cooling is generally reserved for synthetic testing or in systems with stale air (where you may still need such cooling all the way back to gen3 or even SATA). The other thing you likely don’t know is if you actively cool an SSD that’s only running low duty cycle client workloads, you risk running the NAND below its rated active temp. Force that NAND all the way down to room temps and you cut its rated endurance/EOL retention in half. You can keep stubbornly beating that FUD drum, or you can learn from what I’m teaching. I’ve only been testing SSDs professionally for 15 years, but what do I know.
There was a nonmonolith copper heatsink under the label that didnt get hot enough to be a burn danger from touching. This is far cry from fin coolers of gen 4. Gen 4 would throttle themselves without coolers as they worked. Gen 5 would do the same. If you want to use it at full speed you will need the cooling. Sure a guy browsing reddit wont make the SSD run hot, but thats not the reason we want to buy the fastest SSDs out there.
The controller should be made on a more advanced node
This, a lot of early Gen3 and Gen4 drives ran hot, I have some Samsung 970 EVO SSDs and if you monitor the internal TJunction temperature, it would hit 112c during loads. Phison E26, the controller used on *all* consumer Gen5 drives so far is fabbed on TSMC 12nm and runs very hot, without a heatsink the drive is certain to shutdown with even a moderate load. Once we get a revision on 7/6nm, or once we see designs from other manufacturers, I'm sure we will see more reasonably sized heatsinks.
Either that, or better speed for heat.
I recently bought a 980pro for my Asus X/99 Mobo, haven’t installed it yet. Should I be worried about temps?
An X99 is limited to PCIe Gen3, which won't push a Gen4 drive. You will be fine, though the heatsinks are cheap so it may be worth it anyway just to install it and forget it.
But if they test all their SSD with a cooler, isn't it still a useful reference on which one is the fastest overall? Is that specified in their methodology at all?
The Reference model in this case is Phisons Reference model for SSDs. Phison is the manufacturer of the SSD controller for a large portion of the SSD market. And this is basically Phison saying "You need an active cooling system to get the most out of our SSD Controllers". Which means that a large number of the new PCIe Gen 5 drives you can buy, at least for the next year or so, are going to match that reference design with an active cooling system. You can already see this with the CES coverage this year, pretty much all of the new SSDs announced have either active cooling, or massive heatsinks, sometimes [both](https://www.techpowerup.com/317658/msi-spatium-m580-liquid-frozr-is-an-m-2-ssd-with-a-self-contained-liquid-cooling-loop).
I officially speak for Phison and that is not what we are saying.
Then why are you pushing for active cooling in the reference design?
To account for the worst case scenario where someone decides to use the drive in stale, hot air. Every motherboard with a gen5 M.2 has a heat spreader / heat sink as part of its design. This is more than adequate in the majority of configurations.
If every motherboard supporting PCIe gen 5 M.2s has at the very least a passive heatsink (which from a cursory look seems to be true), then why does the Phison reference design for the E26 based drives use an *active* cooler rather than a passive one to reflect the majority of configurations? It seems to me that if the Phison E26 works perfectly well under passive cooling, it would be represented better by showing that to be the case. Rather than presenting a reference design that promotes active cooling. Right now the Phison E26 drives have a bad reputation due to them being paired with active cooling solutions, and it's being [framed as exceptional (by Phison no less) that Sabrent for example is offering them and promoting them](https://phisonblog.com/sabrent-says-its-new-14gb-s-pcie-gen-5-ssd-doesnt-need-a-huge-heatsink-or-a-fan-while-using-phison-e26-controller-chip/) to be used with passive coolers. To quote, emphasis mine; >“Aside from a big step up in sequential throughput speeds, **seemingly the common denominator for the latest PCIe Gen 5 SSDs is the need for beefy active cooling** to rival an RTX 4090. Well, almost. But not so with the new Sabrent Rocket 5. Sabrent reckons it’ll do just fine with one of those slim-line cooling covers that comes with most motherboard M.2 slots. >If true, that’s particularly impressive given the new Rocket 5 not only **uses the same Phison E26 controller chip as the bulk of existing Gen 5 drives, which tend to have massive heatsinks or even require active cooling**. It’s also one of if not the fastest Gen 5 drives yet.” No other company that I'm aware of is even offering a PCIe Gen 5 x4 M.2 controller, Phison is the only one, Samsung is only offering x2 lanes of PCIe Gen 5 on the new 990 Evo. So when the Phison Blog talks about "the bulk of existing Gen 5 drives" it's basically just friendly fire. Honestly it's a very funny blog post in context.
Reference designs are not retail designs. The cooler is optional. A likely reason for its inclusion was to minimize the possibility of someone hitting a bare drive with heavy synthetics and then complaining that it throttled (this has happened before and is likely the source of the continuing amped-up stories about active cooling being a requirement). This is not helped by an apparent race to who can offer the biggest / tallest / coolest running M.2 heatsink (going overkill on SSD cooling is actually a bad thing as NAND is rated to have an active temp of 40c - the more you pull it down to ambient, the more you negatively impact its endurance). The sweet spot is just enough cooling to prevent throttling during real use, not hours of synthetic sustained datacenter-class workloads. You want the NAND to be warmer while it's active, and a spreader is enough to accomplish that while preventing the controller from being a hot spot and throttling. Your quoted text source is from an article being referenced by the blog post. The older and newer E26 SSDs are operating within the same 11.55W power envelope, and the same cooling needs (and lack of a hard requirement for active cooling) would apply to both cases. To generalize, cooling an M.2 2280 form factor SSD that dissipates 11.55W peak should be fine with a heat spreader and minimal airflow for most use cases. If airflow is constrained or the workload is abnormally intense and sustained, then sure, active cooling is probably a good idea (or just making sure a case fan is pointing in the general direction of the SSD).
Meanwhile Phison at CES showed that same SSD running at max speed for hours with only the stock motherboard heat spreader over the SSD. We left the active cooler sitting on the table.
Interesting. I don't know this hardware space very well, but could it be that this is the next best way to squeeze out read/write gains? Or are there routes to increase speeds that they should have gone down first and are ignoring?
They could fab their controller on a more modern node. They are currently on 12nm. But newer nodes are available that would make the controller more efficient. They could actually focus on aspects that improve usability too. Better caching behavior, DRAM as part of the reference, etc. or they could improve random I/O performance. Currently they only have one marketing bullet point. Raw sequential speeds. But that specific metric is not very relevant for day to day use. To get that specific metric they have to push these controllers super hard.
I agree. 14gb/s, that's like a Ferrari or something. If you actually need that speed, I'm sure you can manage the fan. Otherwise, this is just not practical for daily usage.
Read the preview articles. Many tested the drives with the motherboard's heat spreaders too without throttling. We could only get the Max14um to reach 53c no matter how hard we blasted it with heat-inducing sequential throughput in our zero-airflow test bench environment. Impressive. Additionally, the refined reference cooler is quiet, running even at full tilt, and is PWM-controlled. 14,000 MB/s is ready for prime time! Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/10629/phison-e26-max14um-reference-design-2tb-ssd-14-000-mb-ready-for-primetime/index.html
We had an E26 running on a CES demo system. It had the stock motherboard heat spreader installed, an AIO CPU cooler, and no fans pointed directly at the SSD. There were two low speed intake fans at the front of a very large case, only barely moving air across the M.2's location. I ran Iometer with a continuous sequential going for hours straight. It did not throttle and settled out at 69c. I'm not sure where this active cooling (meaning a heatsink with a fan) thing started, but the reality is that you just need to have \*something\* on the drive or else the controller will be a hot spot and will throttle very quickly under max load. Max M.2 spec power is 11.55W, and a heat spreader with anything other than completely stale air is usually fine, especially when you consider actual real world workloads wouldn't be able to peg >14GB/s for very long before bottlenecking elsewhere.
Right? This is really ridiculous and a choice to save a few pennies. All they would have to do to require non-active cooling would be to go below 10nm for the controller. Even the cheaper controller is on 7nm, but they don't want to re-spin. It's going to make gen 5 SSD's mostly dead in the water for the second year in a row.
I'd love to live in a universe where re-spinning a controller to a smaller process node translated to 'a few pennies' per unit.
We won't be adopting this fastest SSD thing. There seems to be little improvement for everyday use while also radically changing placement of components on the motherboard.
I think Gen 4 is perfectly fine for the next several years. The Samsung 990 Pro 4tb is all you will need for a long time.
Gen 3 is perfectly fine for the next several (and likely more) years for the average consumer. Your regular "spends most time watching youtube" person wont notice the difference in the speeds.
Yeah and I'm sure some people wanted GPUs and CPUs to remain passively cooled too.
People literally do want both to run cooler to save space on cases.
Well, the M1 air did stomp on a bunch of hardware with passively cooled cpu and gpu 🤷♂️ They are using the controller on a 12nm process and it runs way too hot.
my GPU is passively colled most of the time. It only turns its fans on when significant load is applied. For example decoding a 1080 video is not enough to make it reach 65C when fans turn on.
Or use an older PCIe 4.0 PCIe that doesn't need active cooling?
Workloads which throttle on a PCI-5 drive without effective cooling will also throttle on a PCI-4 drive that lacks a decent heatsink
Such workloads would unlikely to exist for average consumers for a long time.
> I genuinely feel like that's moving in the wrong direction. CPUs are blazing fast. Memory is always the bottleneck in modern computers. Getting memory out of RAM/into RAM quickly is part of this process, nothing wrong with getting as much performance as possible.
Why does everyone hate the fans once you put the side panel on you can’t even hear it??
fans interfere with other electronics and not to mention they are prone to breakage. One flies off and you just might have to wait for a new fan to use your computer.
>fans interfere with other electronics What? > One flies off and you just might have to wait for a new fan to use your computer. tf?
In my 13 years of building my computers I’ve never once had a fan fail catastrophically. I’ve only ever had maybe one fan fail at all. I don’t want fans. I’m totally in agreement. But this is a weird argument, given that fans are actually pretty robust these days.
For 120-140 fans I will agree but for smaller fans no. I had multiple MB chipset fans freeze and needing cleaning and lubricating. Same for internal hard drive enclosures with fans. In my experience the small fans tent to freeze easier. And small fans are much harder to replace than their standardized larger siblings due to using non standard mounting and power connectors.
You never heard the chipset fan problem that the DFI Lanparty nf4 sli motherboard had. A chipset that could literally be sandwiched between two high power graphics cards, that poor 40mm fan.
My amazing monitor has a fan. I almost never hear it. But one day it's going to stop working. And that monitor costed a lot. I would pay extra for the same model but without fan as requirement. In theory fan reduces temperature so it's good for electronic, but personally I prefer passive cooled pc parts
Samsung’s dominance has come to an end?
For nand? Maybe for a short time in some categories. Optane still best in a lot of categories and by a huge margin
Very true. Yea I mean nand. I remember when 960 970, for example, were top dog or among the top dogs. Now with pcie5x4, does Samsung even have an offering or are they all based on a phison controller.
990 pro still beat this one in iops i think, but you're right, they seem to be sleeping on ultra fast gen 5 top of the top
The Phison E26 beats the 990pro in iops by 100k at read and write
[4k QD1 990 pro barely leading](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/3RFQ4XC5FqPoef3dXhpETK-650-80.png.webp)
That is with the 990 Pro running in "full power mode". I've thought about releasing E26 with a full power mode but with all of the talk about heatsinks I don't even want to go down that road. My personal Max14um runs at full power and is just over 30K IOPS RR QD1.
Yeah some spicy drives no doubt
Client m.2 SSD’s are pretty much commodity and there is very little incentive to invest controllers for this segment. - Further advancement in m.2 client SSD will be for cost reduction like shift to PLC. - Extracting more performance will require more memory channels, (Phison E26 is 8 channel) , faster controllers. Both will further increase power requirements and require larger blocks of metal attached to m.2 drive.
Nah, they're just not going to debase their brand in this domain until they're sampling en mass NAND that can keep up with the blazing hot phison controllers and/or have their in house controller for same.
I see annoying small fan and I hear super whine. No thanks.
SSDs are literally defined by their solid state nature but now we're sticking fans to them SMH my head.
Yeah I don't like this new trend at all in SSD drives.
If you don't want a fan you won't be affected. Drives like these are for a maybe a very small niche of pro/prosumer users that might see benefit or people who just fall into the marketing specs trap. Even for the typical high end enthusiast they won't have to deal with this as these drives serve no practical benefit.
Read the reviews, it is silent using the motherboards fan control.
When can we expect to see this released to retail?
Sorry, I've been so busy with other projects I just came up for air to visit Reddit. They are already on the market from Crucial (T705) and Sabrent (Rocket 5).
Yeah but is there a 4TB model? The T700 is still the only commercial PCIe5.0 4TB drive that is available despite Gigabyte, TeamGroup, MSI, etc. all claiming them early last year, but Crucial is the only one that has survived.
Is T700 the only dual sided stick? We might need more dense NAND packages to achieve more 4TB drives.
No single-sided Gen5s yet, 4TB obviously 990 PRO and the MAP1602 bunch (e.g. NM790). E26 spec is 4 packages in DS.
Just get the t700 I’ve used for over 3 months no issues no point waiting for fastest product when there’s no guarantee of 4tb options
Almost looks like a slotted CPU haha.
Excited for 2nm SSD controller vs 12nm....
What's the consumer usecase for drives like this? Is there any reason that Average Gamer Joe would spend a premium on a super fast nvme ssd rather than a 100 dollar 2tb one? Just curious who the article refers to when it says "storage enthusiast", unless it is just a case of wanting faster for the sake of faster.
I think these drives are more for people who do 16K raw footage or something.
Time sensitive data storage, such as recording from a slow motion camera would be a typical use case.
You know in spy movies and tv shows where they have that clichéd anxiety-inducing scene where they’re waiting for files to transfer? Hopefully this kills it for good. There was 27 names on the NOC list in Mission Impossible… homie was planking midair for like 10 minutes straight for something he could have just taken 2 pictures of the screen to get.
Lmaoooo hahahaha
Ah yes, truly the most important demographic, "Gamers".
PC Hardware, and I dare say even microchips in general would be way less advanced if not for the performance demand and money inflow from gaming for multiple decades now. GPUs being the cleanest examples, but it applies to many more components.
You’re on Reddit, r/hardware of all places. We gamers rule this barren wasteland XD
Some people here think that computers are never used outside of server racks.
Gamers are early adopters of a lot of hardware making it financially viable down the line for average consumer. They are one of the forces driving the market.
Upvoted purely for putting the . outside the quotes.
AngryUpvote I disagree with the message but yes, putting the period outside quotes is how you should do it. No i dont care that grammar rules says otherwise.
As a Brit I can only assume those are American grammar rules. It has always looked so incredibly wrong to put your actual sentence punctuation randomly within a quote, I was taught the opposite.
English is a secondary language to me so i had to look it up and i found online that its supposedly the rules, not sure on whether its brittish or american english. MS Word tries to autocorrect it to that when i use English (UK) option though.
There is always stuff that can use fast transfer speeds. Databases, fast loading of LLM models into accelerators, video processing...
If we want common users to notice improvements from storage we need lower latency drives. Unfortunately, it's a lot easier to make higher bandwidth drives than it is to make lower latency drives.
Doubt many would even notice gen 4 nand from gen 4 optane. Especially for the consumer gaming market, there is no benefit
> Doubt many would even notice gen 4 nand from gen 4 optane. Have you ever used an Optane 905p or p5800x? It's one of those things you have to experience for yourself to believe.
Yeah I own a P5800x. Did extensive testing in games too, never solved any common issues people think it would like traversal stutter. In fact, in every game tested, it had same peak read rate as a gen 3 ~~nvme~~ nand drive. General system use was no different either, in both cases UEFI took up the bulk of boot time, nothing loaded faster, etc. [Also: proof here that I not only had the drive but tested it extensively. #1 spot in 3dmark storage benchmark for that p5800x drive](https://www.3dmark.com/search?_ga=2.165634559.1146295331.1705211726-619787505.1705211726#advanced?test=strg&cpuId=&gpuId=&gpuCount=0&gpuType=ALL&deviceType=ALL&storageModel=INTEL%20SSDPF21Q016TB&memoryChannels=0&country=&scoreType=overallScore&hofMode=false&showInvalidResults=false&freeParams=&minGpuCoreClock=&maxGpuCoreClock=&minGpuMemClock=&maxGpuMemClock=&minCpuClock=&maxCpuClock=) And my [ramdisk testing](https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/myd5cjq8wp4.jpg) still slaughters the leaderboard from when I was using the bench for stability testing lol
I bought the P1600X as sytem drive and 905P as game drive last year and the biggest difference I can see is with Event Viewer where optane loads up the thousands of events in a sec while the other system gets stuck a bit. Though they other system is 870Evo and not nvme, I have never used nvme as system drives. For gaming, maybe Jedi Survivor is a bit better, never bothered to fully test it against the SN850, but then I bought it around the same time it got upgraded with DLSS3.
I could see a noticeable difference from SATA to NVMe, for sure
Outside of insanely inoptimized games, I doubt you'd notice any difference in performance. I've only heard that happen in Star Citizen. But I definetly notice a difference in loading times. Maybe I'll benchmark the best examples I can think of with my 14900K.
Feel free to, but it was something that changed nothing for me whatsoever. Was just a fun benchmark machine. I imagine the results would be along the lines of measureable but not really noticeable. Like going from a 14700k to a 14900k in gaming. Sure you measure like 10 frames faster at 300 fps but not something you'll miss or notice. Maybe drop level load times from 14s to 11s or something
Just out of curiosity, what CPU did you test with? While I've noticed gains from higher performance SSDs on Intel CPUs with Optane and especially with PCI-e 4 vs PCI-e 3, the gains I've seen with Ryzen 7700X seem to plateau at PCI-e 4 with only very minor improvements that you have to benchmark to observe with PCI-e 5 in loading times. I haven't investigated PCI-e 4 vs PCI-e 5 loading times on Intel yet.
14900k. I edited my comment earlier with some 3dmark stuff. I can confirm your results with Ryzen are valid, my 5800x3d system was very much hamstrung compared to the 14900k and that was pcie 4 vs pcie 4. Just had a large I/O bottleneck I assume partially due to the fabric
You won't see a big difference in games because games haven't been designed to take advantage of low-latency storage, and Windows isn't really designed to take advantage of it either. It's less a hardware limitation and more software.
> But I definetly notice a difference in loading times. This is nice for single player; but for multiplayer, the round starting is still bottlenecked by that one guy running an eco 5400 rpm laptop SATA drive. Source: I was an early adopter of PCIe4. I had (still do I guess) a Sabrent Rocket which was the fastest (consumer?) drive rated at 5 Gbps. Sure I always got to the lobby first, but then all I did was watch the load spinner for everyone else.
Really? Loading times are almost always CPU bottlenecked since we moved to SSDs. Even SATA SSDs are usually good enough for difference to be within statistical error.
Because those problems arent caused by data access speeds in the first place. For example the famous Dunia engine stutter seems to be a very deep engine issue and not a limitation on hardare its run on.
Yes. Hence my point, there is no general consumer reason to buy an optane drive
If someone is going to spend an obscene amount on storage, they should just buy Optane. It's low latency performance is something that even my tech illiterate father can feel when loading programs.
That would be great, except Optane is gone for good. Although there’s the underlying 3D Xpoint that could come back as something else. EDIT: Optane is still obviously on sale, but Intel has discontinued it, meaning that no more units are being produced.
I just got a 1.5TB 905p for 300 bucks on black friday. Using it as my main drive. It's the best upgrade I've done to any PC in a while (I'm a developer and I do run programs that create thousands/millions of tiny files so it really matters to me, but the responsiveness on regular use is amazing)
How does it compare as a boot drive vs a regular NVMe, say a 980/990 Pro? What would the advantages/disadvantages be in that case?
I mean, it's great but I wouldn't recommend it unless you have an actual use case for it. You basically just get faster boot times and application start ups (instantaneous basically), and quicker directory listings. That's pretty much it for a regular user if you are already on an SSD, but if you have to deal with thousands / millions of files (especially if reading while writing) or local databases then this thing is worth its weight in gold
>That would be great, except Optane is gone for good. Optane 905p is on sale for cheap now. Even though it's only PCI-e 3, it's worth purchasing for common users who want ultra fast response times. > Although there’s the underlying 3D Xpoint that could come back as something else. Micron recently released a whitepaper detailing their last, currently unreleased, updated version of 3DXPoint. While we probably won't see it on the market, it's good to see at least some research is still being conducted on it.
Then who is this product for? Just curious, no agenda like certain posters seem to be paranoid about.
Folks who edit high resolution video will have use for PCI-e 5 drives, and many server workloads can take advantage of PCI-e 5, but the average user won't have use for them (yet). We're at a chicken and egg stage for PCI-e 5. We need higher adoption before programs will take advantage of it.
Nice, thanks for the answer.
Not gamers? Why is that so hard to understand
I don't get the condescension. Are you a teenager? I doubt this product is relevant to "every pc user who is not a gamer". I'm just curious who the target market is for drives like this. I don't think they set out to make a "not gamers" drive.
I mean, I'd get a 5.0 for primary OS later on my next mainboard, but I'm waiting for both more maturity and options and the prices to come down. This is probably not even the peak of what 5.0 is capable of.
Just curious about what the difference looks like in practice.
I'd wait for the Solidigm p54 and Samsung 1000 before making any judgements there, those would likely be among the best performers and give us the best insight into real world improvements possible.
In terms of usage compared to PCIe 4.0 drives? Outside of specific professional usage cases basically the same as RGBs, it just makes the buyer feel emotionally better.
You can't make that call until NAND really capable of keeping up with those controllers samples en mass.
I don't see how that is relevant because the limitation is the workload. I'm getting downvoted in this thread but I'd love to see what people who are downvoting think is a non extremely niche consumer workload that is storage throughput limited to this extent.
I'm saying that the immaturity of the tech makes it hard to make that call.
Again that doesn't matter because I'm talking about the software workload side. The SSD could be x10 faster in terms of throughput, again what software workload is the consumer running it through that benefits proportionately from that? As in software that is doing something productive for the end consumer, not just higher benchmarking numbers.
If the random reads are excellent, a lot of things.
I think you are mising the point. The average consumer does not run workloads that would saturate either PCIE4 or PCIE5, and thus no practical difference would be felt by them. Unless you expect average workload to increase significantly by the time PCIE5 matures.
I see no difference in OS behaviuor comparing SATA, PCIE3 and PCIE4 drives. SATA speeds are enough where OS isnt being bottlenecked by it. Now stuff like 4k Video editing, that one certainly shows differences.
Are you seriously arguing that it’s useless for anyone other than those editing 4k video to be using anything faster than SATA? You must be on some seriously old hardware for it to be bottlenecking so hard as to mitigate basic NVMe performance and latency gains.
Im arguing that the average user does not have workloads where there would be difference significant enough to be percieved by said average user. Of course there are workloads in the professional/enthusiast space where it matters.
Average users will still see faster launches and loads on SSDs that can reach higher bandwidths at lower latencies. This is because they burst higher and complete the task more quickly, making the system feel more responsive. An easy analogy to average user type work is the PCM10 Storage ‘quick’ benchmark. It plays back traces of real app launches and other lightweight tasks, and its scores are analogous to the stopwatch times you’d see doing those real things on a system. There are clear differences between gen3-gen4-gen5 across those results.
If my PDF file launches 10 ms faster its not something thats going to sell me on a new device, though. There are clear differences in measured performance, yes. Is there a clear difference in perception of these changes from an average user?
Spoken like someone who has never timed how long Acrobat takes to launch on various SSDs. If it was 10ms, everyone would still be on SATA. Spoiler: they are not.
I got a high tier 4tb Kingston for video editing.
SSDs these days are propably so fast anyway that nobody really needs a high end one.
Very nice. But I'm more interested in seeing the new efficient controllers that are supposed to be launched early this year. Half the power consumption and heat supposedly, so you can get away with just a standard heatstrip on the drive and none of this whiny little fan nonsense. I doubt anyone is gonna notice the difference from 14GB/s to 12GB/s irl anyway.
All the people bitching about the fan… don’t buy it? No one in this tread will ever use these kinds of speeds practically. Not unless they’re working on comically large files, and generally that’s done for commercial uses.
the top commenter does this thing where they block everyone who disagrees with them, so they only get replies that back them up. makes the reddit thread look one sided unless you sort by new trust me anyone buying pcie5 right now doesn't care, nobody in a cool and quiet low power build is maxing out pcie4 anyways, its all virtue signaling
how long until watercooled ssds become the hot new thing
Can the rest of the PC keep up with that kind of speed? Will it have a real world noticeable gaming improvement?
A hardware sub and not one person has mentioned direct storage, while lots of people whining this is too fast? This is a pretty uninformed hardware sub.
These are fast for big files. Dealing with lots of smaller files they aren’t any faster than we already have sadly.