In all shapes and sizes - SK Hynix release enterprise PCIe 4.0 SSDs

[williamcll]

Comes in U.2, rulers and all the kinds of server drives you could imagine. Speeds go up to 6.5GB/s

Quote

SK hynix Inc. (or “the Company,” www.skhynix.com)) today announced the availability of the “PE8000” series, its newest and most advanced line-up of enterprise Solid State Drives (eSSDs). The PE8000 series is designed to meet the diverse needs of datacenter customers. PE8010 and PE8030 are the Company’s first Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) SSDs supporting the PCIe Gen4 Interface. Both drives feature the Company’s 96-layer Triple-Level Cell (TLC) 4D NAND flash and an in-house controller, providing a maximum capacity of 8TB, and are compatible with U.2/U.3 form factors. PE8010 is tailored to read-intensive workloads, while PE8030 is optimized for mixed-use. The two products boast the strongest performance among low-power PCIe Gen4 SSDs in the market. Both PE8010 and PE8030 can deliver sequential read speeds of up to 6,500MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 3,700MB/s, with random read and write of up to 1,100K and 320K Input/output operations per second (IOPs), respectively. Compared to the Company’s previous solution launched in 2019, PE8010 offers substantial performance improvements of 103% for sequential reads and 357% for random writes at maximum power consumption of 17W. Both drives are now sampling with customers. Meanwhile, PE8111 is a high-capacity storage solution optimized for read-intensive applications, built with SK hynix’s state-of-the-art technology, the world’s first 128-layer 1Tb (Terabit) TLC 4D NAND flash. SK hynix is currently developing a 16TB version of PE8111 eSSD in the new EDSFF 1U Long (E1.L) form factor, and plans to develop a 32TB solution in the future. The Company is slated to start sampling the 16TB PE8111 eSSD in the second half of this year. PE8111 is specifically optimized for Open Compute Project (OCP) storage platforms, supporting sequential read and write speeds of up to 3,400MB/s and 3,000MB/s, and random read and write of up to 700K and 100K IOPs, respectively. Most notably, the solution provides the same capacity with only half the amount of NAND dies compared to the solution based on 512Gb (Gigabit) NAND flash. As a result, the solution offers superb performance, power efficiency, and price competitiveness, excelling across the board in the existing eSSD solutions market. SK hynix is a global memory semiconductor manufacturer with DRAM, NAND flash, and controllers in its portfolio, a full range of technologies for SSDs. Despite being a relative latecomer to the eSSD market, the Company continues to strengthen its presence with the expertise and know-how gained as a leading DRAM manufacturer. SK hynix will keep expanding thus with vigorous product development and increasingly diverse offerings going forward. “SK hynix has successfully introduced its PCIe Gen3 eSSD products to the market, solidifying its competitive position in the enterprise storage business,” said Vice President Samil Kim, head of the eSSD business at SK hynix. “We will reinforce our technology leadership through the mass production of our PCIe Gen4 products in the second half of this year, and also provide eSSDs with high performance and reliability to our hyperscaler and enterprise OEM customers.”

Source: https://www.ithome.com/0/481/814.htm

https://news.skhynix.com/sk-hynixs-low-power-nvme-pcie-gen4-enterprise-ssds-available-now-for-sampling/

Thoughts: It seems like enterprise PCIe 4 SSDs are still rather rare, I would wait to see what other brands have to offer before I make a decision.

[TempestCatto]

By the time these become relevant, PCIe gen 5 will be out.

[Sauron]

Overkill for 99.999% of use cases but cool.

[Đỗ Đức Huy]

Can't wait for these puppies to go on clearance sale like the PM953. Slightly longer than the standard 2280 form factor at 22110 but they are CHEAP, like 100$ retail for a 1TB, TLC, NVME enterprise class SSD

[Doobeedoo]

Cool though.
I hope to see more MLC drives, when everyone were saying SSDs will continue to get cheaper and higher capacity, it was expected for MLC not lower quality types.

[Unixsystem]

On 4/14/2020 at 1:07 PM, TempestCatto said:

By the time these become relevant, PCIe gen 5 will be out.

Considering that even these 4.0 SSDs can't take full advantage of 4.0 x4 bandwidth (not to mention that the IOPS are barely different at all) I'd say it really doesn't matter. Seems like it's going to be a while for NAND to get to a density where it can realistically use these massive busses. 

 

Spoiler

I wonder if a 4.0 or 5.0 SSDs could get plugged into an x2 slot and get comparable performance, or is the controller hooked up in such a way that it needs all 4 lanes to properly balance load across all the memory dies. 

 

[cj09beira]

19 minutes ago, Unixsystem said:

Considering that even these 4.0 SSDs can't take full advantage of 4.0 x4 bandwidth (not to mention that the IOPS are barely different at all) I'd say it really doesn't matter. Seems like it's going to be a while for NAND to get to a density where it can realistically use these massive busses. 

 

  Hide contents

I wonder if a 4.0 or 5.0 SSDs could get plugged into an x2 slot and get comparable performance, or is the controller hooked up in such a way that it needs all 4 lanes to properly balance load across all the memory dies. 

 

if both devices support say pcie 5.0 then x2 should see pcie 4.0 x4 speeds

 

On 4/14/2020 at 7:07 PM, TempestCatto said:

By the time these become relevant, PCIe gen 5 will be out.

with no controllers to speak of just like what happened to pcie 4,