Next generation storage?

[BigChobbs]

The next generation of consoles, the ps5 and project scarlett are going to have ssds that are much faster than todays drives, probably pcie gen 4 and potentionally maxing out the x4 bandwith, which i believe sits around the 8 gigabytes a second range. Pcie 4 ssds now are around 5. Will current ssds still be relevant for PCs as it relates to gaming when these consoles are released at the end of 2020? What kind of performance difference will there be? Im probably not going to upgrade my pc as it stands, and build a new one early to mid 2021, but i may salvage some stuff from my current one, namely the ssds, i have a 500gb samsung 970 evo plus, and a 1tb samsung 860 evo. Will these still be sufficient at that point in time? I may buy another new one as a boot drive at that point anyway, but im just wondering. I have plenty of time to think about it. 

[dizmo]

Of course. SATA SSDs are still relevant now, you don't really see that much of a gain from NVME except for certain scenarios and workloads.

HDDs are still sufficient. So. You might want to change your wording, as I don't think you're going to get the answer you're really looking for.

[Xaring]

First, please, space out your text in paragraphs! It makes reading your post so much easier!

Second, I doubt very much that said consoles max out a PCI-E Gen 4 bandwith. It just doesn't work that way. The maximum theoretical speed for an x4 link on gen 3 is 4 GB/s and there are no drives on the market that do that (you get up to 3.7GB/s or so).

 

Third, you shouldn't worry about your drives being quick enough for games... There's only up to a certain performance you can gain. If you look at current technology, the difference in loading times between an SSD and a HDD is extremely evident, but once you start comparing different SSDs between each other, you find out that the higher speeds are not used at all.

Made up numbers here: Loading in a game can take 2 minutes in a HDD. That goes down to 35s on a Sata SSD, then that goes down to 25s on a NMVE(Gen3) SSD, which goes down to 20s on a NVME(Gen4). The are diminishing returns, as the bottleneck starts happening elsewhere.

In any case, you can always treat yourself in the future with a nice, new SSD if you feel like there really is a need, but you already have a 970 Evo Plus, which is a really nice drive, so i'll say you're set for a couple of years for sure.

[kelvinhall05]

If the PS5 will have it, the most basic bitch of PCs probably will.

 

 

Yes, today's SSDs will still be relevant. I mean, hard drives have been in use since the 1950s...

 

 

I feel like modern SSDs will be the hard drives of "in a few generations" since they'll probably get super cheap and more reliable.

[Xaring]

1 minute ago, kelvinhall05 said:

If the PS5 will have it, the most basic bitch of PCs probably will.

 

 

Yes, today's SSDs will still be relevant. I mean, hard drives have been in use since the 1950s...

 

 

I feel like modern SSDs will be the hard drives of "in a few generations" since they'll probably get super cheap and more reliable.

Have you seen the new "Octane RAM" stuff from intel? It looks super promising. 
I'd love just mixing up 16GB of "Standard RAM" for the super quick latency and another 512GB of "Solid State Ram" to keep games and programs in.

[kelvinhall05]

1 minute ago, Xaring said:

Have you seen the new "Octane RAM" stuff from intel? It looks super promising. 
I'd love just mixing up 16GB of "Standard RAM" for the super quick latency and another 512GB of "Solid State Ram" to keep games and programs in.

The problem with RAM is that it requires constant, steady power otherwise *boom* your data is gone.

 

 

I guess you could put batteries in your SSDs, but that sounds really stupid, especially considering the battery will probably die/fail long before the SSD/RAM itself does.

[BigChobbs]

5 minutes ago, Xaring said:

First, please, space out your text in paragraphs! It makes reading your post so much easier!

Second, I doubt very much that said consoles max out a PCI-E Gen 4 bandwith. It just doesn't work that way. The maximum theoretical speed for an x4 link on gen 3 is 4 GB/s and there are no drives on the market that do that (you get up to 3.7GB/s or so).

 

Third, you shouldn't worry about your drives being quick enough for games... There's only up to a certain performance you can gain. If you look at current technology, the difference in loading times between an SSD and a HDD is extremely evident, but once you start comparing different SSDs between each other, you find out that the higher speeds are not used at all.

Made up numbers here: Loading in a game can take 2 minutes in a HDD. That goes down to 35s on a Sata SSD, then that goes down to 25s on a NMVE(Gen3) SSD, which goes down to 20s on a NVME(Gen4). The are diminishing returns, as the bottleneck starts happening elsewhere.

In any case, you can always treat yourself in the future with a nice, new SSD if you feel like there really is a need, but you already have a 970 Evo Plus, which is a really nice drive, so i'll say you're set for a couple of years for sure.

But with the consoles having ssds, wont that cause game devs to optimize games for them? Causing huge gains in load times?

[Firewrath9]

3 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

The problem with RAM is that it requires constant, steady power otherwise *boom* your data is gone.

Thats the entire point of Optane, its "persistent" memory. It has ~4-5x the latency of dram, and about 1/4 the bandwidth and , but it does offer a small $/GB improvement and it can scale to 512gb/dimm compared to 256gb/dimm for ECC (128GB ECC dimm is 1000$, 128GB optane is 700, 256 optane is 2500)

[Xaring]

3 hours ago, kelvinhall05 said:

The problem with RAM is that it requires constant, steady power otherwise *boom* your data is gone.

 

 

I guess you could put batteries in your SSDs, but that sounds really stupid, especially considering the battery will probably die/fail long before the SSD/RAM itself does.

No, no, Intel already has solid state "Ram" - it doesnt lose its content after power off. Lemme find the video about this week's intel storage conference.
 

 

3 hours ago, BigChobbs said:

But with the consoles having ssds, wont that cause game devs to optimize games for them? Causing huge gains in load times?

Yeah, of course, but that's been a limitation only happening for "AAA" games... PC exclusives have been free of this problem for a while now. 

This video talks exactly about what you're talking about:

 

[vanished]

I highly doubt that any consoles are getting PCIe gen 4 SSDs any time in the near future.  I think they might just be ready to finally offer SSD at all, sure, and I assume they will use zen 2-based Ryzen CPUs/SoCs, meaning that in theory PCIe gen 4 might be possible, but due to the increased cost of a motherboard that supports that, not to mention the significantly higher price of such a high end drive, as well as the fact that it's completely unnecessary and would not provide a meaningful improvement to the gaming experience, I doubt they will do it.  Moving from a HDD, especially a slow one, to an average SATA SSD is a big improvement in gameplay experience.  It reduces loading times and eliminates stutter due to load-ins while moving through an open world.  Moving from a SATA SSD to a faster NVMe SSD, last time it was tested, showed no benefit at all.  To go beyond that to even faster drives is just not worth it for that purpose.

[Jurrunio]

22 hours ago, BigChobbs said:

the ps5 and project scarlett are going to have ssds that are much faster than todays drives, probably pcie gen 4 and potentionally maxing out the x4 bandwith,

That's definitely not happening unless they sell each console over $100 (over 30%) more than their predecessors with reasonable onboard storage capacity. MS and Sony do have the advantage of buying these SSDs in bluk but that's not enough. The gains arent large either considering my laptop with proper PCIe 3.0 X4 SSD dont boot noticeably faster than my desktop with a SATA SSD.

 

22 hours ago, BigChobbs said:

Will current ssds still be relevant for PCs as it relates to gaming when these consoles are released at the end of 2020?

Of course they will, note that consoles have to cost noticeably less than building a desktop, that limits how much performance that can go into a console.

 

21 hours ago, Xaring said:

Have you seen the new "Octane RAM" stuff from intel? It looks super promising.

Super promising yes, but until Intel fixes their CPU mess (where they milk most profit out of) and drop the prices per GB so much that 250GB units are affordable tho it wont be worth recommending. Optane is just like SSDs in 2012, promising but I dont want it.

 

21 hours ago, Xaring said:

I'd love just mixing up 16GB of "Standard RAM" for the super quick latency and another 512GB of "Solid State Ram" to keep games and programs in.

Might as well just buy more RAM and use RAM caching, instead of a half-assed prototype that'a no good on its own.