Kioxia's PCIe 5.0 SSD Hits 14,000 MBps

[Alder Lake]

this is my first tech news, sorry if it gets locked

 

Summary

Kioxia recently somewhat recently held a presentation at the China Flash Market Summit (CFMS) where the company teased a next current-generation PCIe 5.0 SSD that will blow even the best PCIE 4.0 SSDs out of the water, according to a Weixin user. The prototype will likely hail from one of Kioxia's data center product lines, however, it's not far-fetched to think that consumer PCIe 5.0 SSDs will offer a similar level of performance. The SSD reached a blistering read speed of 14,000mbps, which is twice the current read speeds of PCIE 4.0 drives, along a slightly-less-extreme-but-still-impressive-for-today write speed of 7,000mbps, which is about the speed of top-of-the-line drives today.

 

Quotes

Quote

Tom's Hardware

 

Kioxia's PCIe 5.0 SSD will land with sequential read and write speeds up to 14,000 MBps and 7,000 MBps, respectively. For comparison, the brand's current CM6 PCIe 4.0 drive puts out 6,900 MBps reads and 4,200 MBps writes. The PCIe 5.0 upgrade reveals a whopping 103% uplift in sequential read speeds and 67% for writes.

 

Since the PCIe 5.0 drive is aimed at data centers, it will arrive in both EDSFF E3 and 2.5-inch U.2 form factors. Kioxia plans to integrate an eight-channel controller for the data center drives and up to a 16-channel controller for the more demanding enterprise models. Obviously, capacity and endurance won't be an issue. The company plans to offer the PCIe 5.0 SSDs from 1.6TB to 30TB with endurance ratings spanning from 1 to 3 DWPD (drive writes per day).

 

Kioxia will release the PCIe 5.0 SSD in the fourth quarter of this year. The brand expects server manufacturers to take between five to six months to validate and certify the drives for their products. As with any type of cutting-edge technology, market acceptance will be progressive.

Quote

Extreme Tech

According to Kioxia, it can put that bandwidth to good use. The company is claiming sequential transfer rates of up to 14,000MB/s read and 7,000MB/s write. Read latency has dropped from 90us to 70us and write latency from 20us to 10us.

 

My thoughts

My thoughts are that these speeds are absolutely insane, and that equally impressive write speeds should be coming soon, especially as this article is from 3 months ago. This drive is (presumably) available to data centers already, now we just need PCIE 5.0 to be available to us, which makeusof predicts to happen in early 2022, which is right around the corner! Let's hope we're not disappointed! (As the only CPU who supports PCIE 5.0, I promise to not disappoint)

 

Thank you all for reading I'm ready for some feedback from the moderators in the form of a thread lock

 

Sources

Extreme Tech

Tom's Hardware

Makeusof

[LAwLz]

Holy crap.

This drive can read my entire porn collection in under an hour.

[Alder Lake]

5 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Holy crap.

This drive can read my entire porn collection in under an hour.

50TB/hour

 

that's about enough to read my entire system 30 times, and my entire laptop 500 times (also about to hit 500 messages, cool)

[GuiltySpark_]

Differentiating MBps and mbps is critical. Luckily the source article did.

[dizmo]

Speedy. I can't wait to see the flood of threads asking where they can get one for their game drive. 

[Rauten]

So, considering that PCIe 4.0 drives already usually need a heatsink...

Water cooled PCIe 5.0 drive video, sponsored by EK Water Blocks?

[Lurick]

3 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Speedy. I can't wait to see the flood of threads asking where they can get one for their game drive. 

Do I need PCIe 5.0 for Microsoft word?!?!?!?!?!

[FRD]

I assume they are talking about using the actual PCIe (5) connector right and not PCIe lanes on like an m.2. PCIe Gen 4 PCI SSDs are already a ton faster than normal m.2 PCIe Gen 4 and same with Gen 3. The problem so far is still the price. 1TB is usually at least like $200-250 already and just for a very specific market, even though also marketed to gamers often.

[GuiltySpark_]

7 minutes ago, FRD said:

I assume they are talking about using the actual PCIe (5) connector right and not PCIe lanes on like an m.2. PCIe Gen 4 PCI SSDs are already a ton faster than normal m.2 PCIe Gen 4 and same with Gen 3. The problem so far is still the price. 1TB is usually at least like $200-250 already and just for a very specific market, even though also marketed to gamers often.

Quote

...it will arrive in both EDSFF E3 and 2.5-inch U.2 form factors...

 

[Doobeedoo]

Neat. A ton of bandwidth, excited to see them though. Hopefully Windows can leverage it better and with DirectStorage too.

[PeachGr]

I see nvme drives to replace ram in the future on office desktops, or work as ram extensions, same way they do on the recent phones

[Rauten]

11 minutes ago, Lurick said:

Do I need PCIe 5.0 for Microsoft word?!?!?!?!?!

Nah, man.

For MineSweeper.

[StDragon]

7 minutes ago, PeachGr said:

I see nvme drives to replace ram in the future on office desktops, or work as ram extensions, same way they do on the recent phones

It's called an NVDIMM. It harkens back to the old days of magnetic core memory where RAM and storage was one-in-the-same.

 

But due to performance requirements, those roles are still split up into on-die cache, RAM, and persistent storage. There's a tradeoff with each one of those implementations.

 

Cheaper, Better, Faster. You can only pick two.

[Tan3l6]

CPUs had as much bandwidth with L1 cache just some years ago 10+?

[leadeater]

20 minutes ago, Lurick said:

Do I need PCIe 5.0 for Microsoft word?!?!?!?!?!

It's required only if you use Word Art

[Lurick]

5 minutes ago, leadeater said:

It's required only if you use Word Art

Ah, ok, good to know!

I didn't want to spend too much upgrading my PC

[Alder Lake]

1 hour ago, rickeo said:

Differentiating MBps and mbps is critical. Luckily the source article did.

my mistake, I guess it was kind of implied as bits are more typically used in networking rather than drives

1 hour ago, Rauten said:

So, considering that PCIe 4.0 drives already usually need a heatsink...

Water cooled PCIe 5.0 drive video, sponsored by EK Water Blocks?

cryo-cooled*

1 hour ago, Doobeedoo said:

Neat. A ton of bandwidth, excited to see them though. Hopefully Windows can leverage it better and with DirectStorage too.

we'll see what happens

59 minutes ago, PeachGr said:

I see nvme drives to replace ram in the future on office desktops, or work as ram extensions, same way they do on the recent phones

then again, with RAM sticks apparently reaching 128GB/stick, it's not unrealistic to see RAM taking their part as well

[porina]

1 hour ago, Alder Lake said:

now we just need PCIE 5.0 to be available to us

You could have a consumer tier PCIe 5.0 system for over a month now, since the release of Alder Lake at the start of November.

 

53 minutes ago, PeachGr said:

I see nvme drives to replace ram in the future on office desktops, or work as ram extensions, same way they do on the recent phones

The problem with NVMe devices isn't so much the bandwidth limitation but that most SSDs are based on flash, which really sucks in ram-like usage. You have both endurance and a large page size to contend with, and horrible access latency. The better solution in that use case was Optane. Per capacity it is still cheaper than ram, but also lower performing than actual ram. I had wondered if small capacity devices could use it efficiently as a combined ram + storage tier.

 

Also for context, 14 GB/s is close to saturating 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0. It is also comparable to older ram, lying between a single channel of DDR3 1600 and DDR4 2133.

 

The bigger problem I see with making effective use of it in consumer applications is not moving the data, but what you do with it as you move it. It will take time for software to expect that kind of data rate and optimise for it.

[WhitetailAni]

46 minutes ago, Lurick said:

Ah, ok, good to know!

I didn't want to spend too much upgrading my PC

Note that if you use Notepad and WordArt at the same time you'll max any non-Alder Lake chips immediately and the system will feel like it's running a Katmai P3. Any Alder Lake chip will help, but only the 12900K eliminates all slowdowns and makes it feel snappy again.

[Alder Lake]

33 minutes ago, porina said:

You could have a consumer tier PCIe 5.0 system for over a month now, since the release of Alder Lake at the start of November.

 

The bigger problem I see with making effective use of it in consumer applications is not moving the data, but what you do with it as you move it. It will take time for software to expect that kind of data rate and optimise for it.

but could you have an nvme that could fully mostly take advantage of it

 

also that is true, maybe next gen will do something innovative for that

[Salv8 (sam)]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Holy crap.

This drive can read my entire porn collection in under an hour.

it would take a lot longer with mine...

damn i'm lonely.

[Zodiark1593]

5 hours ago, PeachGr said:

I see nvme drives to replace ram in the future on office desktops, or work as ram extensions, same way they do on the recent phones

The two big obstacles to this use are latency, and endurance. 
 

RAM chips can be written virtually an indefinite amount of times without fail. NAND has a definitive endurance limit. 
 

The two technologies are also written and read in different ways. Nand is written in blocks, and when overwritten, must be done as a block, while RAM can allow for direct access and modification to a given value. 
 

Raw bandwidth is only a part (albeit, not an insignificant one) of the story.

 

For specific applications, it may be possible to treat portions of storage as an extension of read-only RAM, similar to cartridge games, which can greatly cut overall RAM usage. So long as you’re not writing to the area like RAM, you sidestep most of the downsides of NAND storage. 

[FloRolf]

6 hours ago, PeachGr said:

I see nvme drives to replace ram in the future on office desktops, or work as ram extensions, same way they do on the recent phones

Well honestly, a single stick of ddr4 2133 makes about 17gbytes/s so in theory you could easily replace that by this pcie 5.0 ssd for Office PCs. Or just Raid0 two of them bad boys and it's rock'n'roll. 

[RejZoR]

So much speed and yet in real world, apart from highly specific brute force sequential scenarios, these drives don't behave any different than high end SATA drives from 5+ years ago... It's a shame really and reason I'm in no rush to buy NVMe SSD drive just yet. Have two in my laptops and that's about it, because they only have NVMe M.2 slots anyways. Selling Samsung 850 Pro 2TB now would be total waste of money as I'd get peanuts for it yet it's probably better than most crappy cheap NVMe drives sold today and comes in still very respectable 2TB capacity. And given how only Windows 11 can have DirectStorage and how sad its adoption is because of lame design decisions by Microsoft, we won't see anything useful for minimum 5 years and 10 years to actually have any kind of meaningful adoption. Yay.

 

Nice progress on paper, but basically entirely useless for 99% of users.

[Forbidden Wafer]

I can't wait to see : ramsomware wave encrypts ssds in minutes and leaves half of the world locked out of their devices.