Samsung Preps PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 SSDs With 176-Layer V-NAND

[Kisai]

On 6/9/2021 at 6:12 AM, leadeater said:

NAND also doesn't like being too cool either so it's actually best to only thermally connect the controller to any heatsinks and let the flash be at like 30C-40C.

 

https://www.eeweb.com/industrial-temperature-and-nand-flash-in-ssd-products/

C = NVME SSD on a PCIe card with a heatsink (no fan) and thermal pad, 7956 POH, WD

V = SATA SSD, 11900 POH, Crucial, on the backside of the case, so it's not being cooled by the air cooling.

 

V also has 50TBW, and C has 25TBW

 

For reference the other drives are mechanical and located in different locations

H = 7200RPM, 28200 POH, WD Black, bottom drive chassis

D = 7200RPM, 70,050 POH, WD Black, bottom drive chassis, oldest drive

G = 7200RPM, 24540 POH, Seagate BarraCuda Pro, bottom drive chassis

F = 2677 POH, External powered USB chassis, WD (Green)

E = 5400rpm, 12075 POH , USB self-powered, WD (Blue)

 

Honestly, I've found that the temperature of the drive has been irrelevant in a desktop, as the drive itself will get hot, regardless if it's in use, and not an indication of the drive health. For the mechanical drives yes, of course a hot drive is more likely to fail, but even then, note there is a 9 degree temperature difference between H and D, get still within the 60 degree operating temperature.

 

By comparison the NVMe drive (C)'s operating temperature maxes at 70. So who knows what the temperature would be with the heatsink off.

 

[leadeater]

17 hours ago, Kisai said:

Honestly, I've found that the temperature of the drive has been irrelevant in a desktop, as the drive itself will get hot, regardless if it's in use, and not an indication of the drive health.

Yea, there just a very short period there where some SSD manufacturers or cooling makers were pushing NVMe SSD cooling and marketing included cooling the NAND chips. That stopped when it was pointed out that cooling the NAND chips was both not necessary and also not actually better. Now most solutions only cool the controller which is good as it's cheaper.

 

Heat isn't a health indicator, it's just a technical aspect to look at when talking about flash memory. Btw the reported temp is the controller temp not the NAND chips.

 

You, typically, need to cool the controller. You do not need to cool the NAND chips.

[cj09beira]

On 6/9/2021 at 1:53 PM, StDragon said:

C:\ = TLC

D:\ and above = QLC

 

 

i would really prefer mlc for the main drive, but finding one is not easy 

[Lightwreather]

1 hour ago, cj09beira said:

i would really prefer mlc for the main drive, but finding one is not easy 

I'd want an SLC drive but they're also hard (if not harder) to come by

[porina]

39 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

I'd want an SLC drive but they're also hard (if not harder) to come by

Presumably SLC is long gone from consumer level drives, and I'm not sure it even exists in enterprise drives. Not as main storage anyway. I was looking at used enterprise SSDs for a side project as I needed predictable sustained write performance. That means it has to be a cache-less design. The native flash type is the only flash operating mode. No pseudo-SLC-cache as commonly found in consumer drives today. Even those older SSDs were native MLC.

 

Implicitly you could get a consumer drive and never use more of it than the pseudo-SLC operating mode. Obviously it'll bump up the effective cost/capacity considerably.

 

The better-than-SLC option is Optane, although I believe the consumer models have been killed off with no replacement. Not that they were cheap either, but only enterprise products remain and they're not going to be cheap.

[StDragon]

2 hours ago, cj09beira said:

i would really prefer mlc for the main drive, but finding one is not easy 

 

49 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

I'd want an SLC drive but they're also hard (if not harder) to come by

A pure SLC drive isn't available. The closest thing in terms of IOPS would be Optane.

 

Samsung abandoned 2-bit MLC and has moved on to TLC being the fastest NAND available for their 980 Pro series. But, with DRAM cache and SLC cache on the SSD, that pretty much mitigates performance related issues for the vast majority of consumers. 

[cj09beira]

9 minutes ago, StDragon said:

 

A pure SLC drive isn't available. The closest thing in terms of IOPS would be Optane.

 

Samsung abandoned 2-bit MLC and has moved on to TLC being the fastest NAND available for their 980 Pro series. But, with DRAM cache and SLC cache on the SSD, that pretty much mitigates performance related issues for the vast majority of consumers. 

i would love to have my os on optane, but i am not rich 

[StDragon]

1 hour ago, cj09beira said:

i would love to have my os on optane, but i am not rich 

I haven't priced out Optane, so if you see such an SSD, it's probably new-old stock marked up. That's because Intel has killed off Optane SSD for the desktop market with the exception of certain mobile solutions.

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-kills-off-all-optane-only-ssds-for-consumers-no-replacements-planned

 

 

[Daethz]

I just hope we see capacity get cheaper, videogames going to be 500gb each soon, need reasonably priced 8tb+ nvme's

[porina]

15 hours ago, cj09beira said:

i would love to have my os on optane, but i am not rich 

I have OS on Optane in one system. You really don't notice the difference in general usage compared to a good flash drive. Doesn't need to be top end, something like a Samsung Evo is plenty.

 

8 hours ago, Daethz said:

I just hope we see capacity get cheaper, videogames going to be 500gb each soon, need reasonably priced 8tb+ nvme's

I went with a 2TB 980 Pro as the sole SSD in my latest gaming build. Got tiered of juggling with multiple smaller SSDs. I know, I could have got a slower SSD for like half the cost and probably not noticed when it comes to game storage, but it does make a bit more of a difference for OS.

[RejZoR]

17 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

I'd want an SLC drive but they're also hard (if not harder) to come by

High performance drives are generally just MLC/TLC operating in layered modes. Meaning, it only uses 1 or 2 cells from the 3 or 4 available. It then uses other layers for wear leveling, which is why they can boost write cycles so far.

 

Where cheap SSD's use all 4 cells in QLC, so you need less physical chips to reach desired capacity.

[Kisai]

22 hours ago, Daethz said:

I just hope we see capacity get cheaper, videogames going to be 500gb each soon, need reasonably priced 8tb+ nvme's

Well not that soon.

 

There is a well known joke about "when will games ship on hard drives"

 

In the floppy disk era, you had some games shipping on as many as 12 diskettes. In the CD-ROM era you had games shipping on up to 8 CD-ROM's, then with the DVD-era you still had games shipping on two discs, and only recently did games start crossing the 25GB single-layer BDROM limit. This is one of those reasons why some Xbox 360 (which used dvd-rom's) games were considered the inferior version because they stripped assets in order for it to fit the loading time of the dvd-rom unit. 

 

Now, this has always been where Nintendo had the best foresight, where they could ship games on ROM carts that were the perfect size for the game, but because the carts were expensive they were always more expensive than the optical media, and as a consequence, even though they were more expensive, they were also the best experience, with the Switch and 3DS having no perceptible loading time unless you picked cheap slow sd-cards to download games from the store onto.

 

Like in the west, where downloading a game from steam might take 1-2 days if the store is particularly slow, at least you can get the game onto your hard drive. But there are other countries where data is still at a premium or the speed is still measured in single-digit megabits (such as rural US) and people would rather buy the game on an actual disc rather than spend two weeks downloading it.

 

[Fnige]

On 6/14/2021 at 9:28 AM, Daethz said:

I just hope we see capacity get cheaper, videogames going to be 500gb each soon, need reasonably priced 8tb+ nvme's

Actually, do they lose sales by having their files be too big? If not, at what point will that happen

[suicidalfranco]

7 hours ago, Kisai said:

people would rather buy the game on an actual disc rather than spend two weeks downloading it.

And still have to download as many gigs of data cause those disc haven't been shipping the games in a complete/unbroken state for a long time.

What's the point in buy physical when the moment you put the thing in you have a day0 patch that is as big as the full game download from the digital store?

[Kisai]

10 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

And still have to download as many gigs of data cause those disc haven't been shipping the games in a complete/unbroken state for a long time.

What's the point in buy physical when the moment you put the thing in you have a day0 patch that is as big as the full game download from the digital store?

 

The attention here is on the wrong thing. Optical media is cheap to make, but expensive to ship. Data costs nothing to duplicate or transmit. It's just about capacity to transmit.

 

When your game console dies, it takes the games with it. When Nintendo or Sony decide to shut down their download stores, and yet provide no way to play those previous purchases on new hardware, what are you expected to do? They expect you to never want to play those games again.

 

Which makes it interesting when their argument against streaming/LP's of games is that it spoils/dissuades people from buying the game. If you can't get the game in the first place, that argument isn't valid.

 

So those patches to games? Unless someone else has been making backups of it and can make a copy for you to replace your legitimately purchased game, no the most likely thing is that you try to find an out-of-print game for no-longer-sold console, you're going to get the unpatched retail disc version.

[StDragon]

3 minutes ago, comander said:

 

C:\ = 3D Xpoint

...

Z:\ = RAID10 HDD array with 32GB RAM = 118GB optane as cache 

 Both Intel and Micron gave up on the consumer marker for 3D XPoint and is serving the datacenter enterprise market.

[suicidalfranco]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

So those patches to games? Unless someone else has been making backups of it and can make a copy for you to replace your legitimately purchased game, no the most likely thing is that you try to find an out-of-print game for no-longer-sold console, you're going to get the unpatched retail disc version.

Those patches to game have become mandatory cause for the vast majority of games getting released in the Last decade have been coming in a broken, closer to none-working state than buggy but playable.

 

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

Those patches to game have become mandatory cause for the vast majority of games getting released in the Last decade have been coming in a broken, closer to none-working state than buggy but playable.

 

And in many cases intentionally so for when you use features like Stream pre-download it's functionally a broken game even with the executable not actually delivered anyway. Then it goes to general release date and you're having to wait for a big ass download. Don't know why they bother to allow that when they defeat the point on purpose.

[Forbidden Wafer]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

Don't know why they bother to allow that when they defeat the point on purpose.

They're collectibles for people to show on their streams on twitch/youtube. 

[RejZoR]

13 hours ago, comander said:

I'm aware. ARGHHH. 

Smart caching software usually ends up being "good enough" though - you get close to the bandwidth of two drives in the best case along with the latency and IOPS of the best drive. For enthusiasts the 58GB 800p still kinda makes sense as a cache (a la primocache or ZFS if you're going the linux route) that mainly targets the OS, programs and metadata in a system... or the 118GB variant if you want to set aside a bit of it for page file and "skimp" on RAM capacity. 

 

You can listen to wendell rant and rave about how awesome the concept it here: https://level1techs.com/video/intel-h20-deep-dive-optane-masses-dark-secret

These days I'd recommend at least 256GB SSD for cache. If you're using some huge 8TB+ HDD I'd even go with 512-1TB SSD.

[porina]

13 hours ago, comander said:

Smart caching software usually ends up being "good enough" though - you get close to the bandwidth of two drives in the best case along with the latency and IOPS of the best drive. For enthusiasts the 58GB 800p still kinda makes sense as a cache (a la primocache or ZFS if you're going the linux route) that mainly targets the OS, programs and metadata in a system... or the 118GB variant if you want to set aside a bit of it for page file and "skimp" on RAM capacity. 

As an owner and user of Optane for OS drive, I still wonder if the advantages are enough vs. a good flash drive. Especially for caching HDs, I think I'd go for capacity over performance for comparable cost.

 

I know SSD pricing has changed over the years, but I paid £400 for 900p 280GB in 2017. Recently I paid £370 for a 980 Pro 2TB.

 

I think Optane needs at least one of two things to take off: cost/capacity much closer to flash, or a new interface that better allows it to show its true power without being limited by NVMe.

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, porina said:

I think Optane needs at least one of two things to take off: cost/capacity much closer to flash, or a new interface that better allows it to show its true power without being limited by NVMe.

NVMe is literately "raw PCIe", you don't get any faster than that unless you put it in the DIMM RAM slot, and that doesn't make it faster than PCIe.

 

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/memory-and-storage/data-center-persistent-mem/Intel-Optane-DC-Persistent-Memory-Quick-Start-Guide.pdf

 

Note that you need one module per memory channel to use it as persistent memory, otherwise it only runs in app mode, and thus needs software support.

 

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.05714.pdf

 

Quote

Optane DC memory occupies a tier in-between SSDs and DRAM. It has higher latency (346 ns) than DRAM but lower latency than an SSD. Unlike DRAM, its bandwidth is asymmetric with respect to access type: for a single Optane DC PMM, its max read bandwidth is 6.6 GB/s, whereas its max write bandwidth is 2.3 GB/s. However, the expected price point of Optane DC memory means that machines with large quantities of Optane DC memory are feasible — our test machine has 3 TB of Optane DC memory across two sockets.

6.6GB is roughly the same or worse performance as NVMe PCIe 4.0 (2GB/lane). In a system where the memory bandwidth is 40GB/sec. 

 

Given, I don't there there are any current retail NVMe products that actually hit 7.8GB/sec read performance. WD Black SN850 hits 7.0GB/sec. Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, hits 6.6GB/sec. Both 96-layer TLC. Samsung 980 Pro is 6.9GB/sec and apparently MLC.

 

So existing flash products already exceed what Optane can do (at least in that benchmark/paper.) 

 

[leadeater]

59 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Given, I don't there there are any current retail NVMe products that actually hit 7.8GB/sec read performance. WD Black SN850 hits 7.0GB/sec. Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, hits 6.6GB/sec. Both 96-layer TLC. Samsung 980 Pro is 6.9GB/sec and apparently MLC.

 

So existing flash products already exceed what Optane can do (at least in that benchmark/paper.) 

Those are all in large block I/O high queue depth tests, real world Optane is an entire order of magnitude faster for the use cases you'd use it for (DIMM or NVMe).

 

 

 

 

[Bombastinator]

A question from a position of limited needs and possibly also severe ignorance:

 

Have data rates higher than sata 6 become functionally useful yet for gaming?  For Anything else not enterprise level?  Last I looked one could get nvme drives that could saturate pcie3x4 but they were expensive.  Has pcie4x4 become saturatable by nvme drives? 

[leadeater]

7 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Have data rates higher than sata 6 become functionally useful yet for gaming?

No not yet, maybe in semi close future so likely a good idea to invest in something NVMe now if buying but since technology moves fast getting a good SATA SSD and then dealing with needing or benefiting from NVMe later is probably going to see you out better in the long with with ending up with a larger capacity and faster NVMe drive.