pcie gen 5 Sabrent and Phison Collaborating on Record Breaking PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSD: Approaching 14,000 MB/s and Beyond

[BiG StroOnZ]

Summary

Sabrent is working closely with Phison to develop a new line of PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSDs that can push read speeds up to 14,000 MB/s, surpassing other companies' 10,000 MB/s range. The new storage is still under development, so one should not expect it to reach the stores any time soon. However, the company has already made some internal tests and expects this solid-state storage to be offered as soon as it is ready. The in-development Sabrent Rocket X5 Gen 5 SSD has already broken the 12,000 MB/s barrier.

 

 

 

Quotes

Quote

Their Rocket X5 SSD with NVMe M.2 interface will reach 12398 MB/s read and 11845 MB/s of sequential write speeds (as per CrystalDiskMark). This is even faster than AORUS, Inland or SSTC storage, which were all locked to 10 GB/s speeds. The Rocket X5 would be in a tight fight against TeamGroup’s Cardea Z540 storage though, which is already advertised for 12 GB/s as well.

 

Sabrent notes that "technology is limiting us at this point" regarding reaching the 14,000 MB/s goal it has set for its new Sabrent Rocket X5 Gen 5 SSD range, adding that it expects "that will come at a later point."

 

Working with Phison makes a lot of sense, as recently, the company presented its results where it was pushing read speeds into the 12,000 MB/s region. "We aim to improve that and increase the performance as high as possible," Sabrent writes, in what is an impressive claim.

 

The new Rocket X5 is still in the tuning process, and we expect performance to improve even better. This still needs to be a finished and finalized product, but we are moving forward with the technology we have at hand now.

 

My thoughts

This is exciting if you are an SSD enthusiast. For a while many of the Gen5 NVMe SSDs we saw were capped at about 10,000 MB/s. Team Group's Cardea Z540 claims to hit these 12 GB/s speeds, but has yet to provide any benchmarks demonstrating so, as Sabrent has done here. According to these numbers from CrystalDiskMark, this SSD from Sabrent breaks all current SSD records. Even the writes nearly hit 12 GB/s at 11,845 MB/s. I know many people claim the average person cannot even saturate a Gen3 NVMe SSD, however, I believe pushing these speeds is important. When I went from a standard SATA SSD to my Gen4 NVMe, I saw an improvement in performance overall. Therefore, I believe at some point there will be a hurdle that Gen5 SSDs will overcome where they can also provide noticeable speed improvements over Gen3 and Gen4. The crucial part to these Gen5 NVMe SSDs is going to be price of course, where we are finally seeing Gen3 and Gen4 NVMe SSDs priced adequately. These next-gen NVMe SSDs are definitely going to be costly, therefore it won't make sense to recommend them for most system builders. However, I imagine in a few years time they will be priced much better, and if they are hitting speeds of 14 GB/s and beyond, that will be especially welcomed. According to Sabrent this is not the finalized product, and even the naming could change. Regardless, this teaser is appreciated and I think it's a good look providing benchmarks to prove your progress; as Sabrent has done here. 

 

Sources

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/sabrent-and-phisons-gen-5-ssds-push-boundaries-to-14000-mbs-and-beyond.html

https://videocardz.com/newz/sabrent-rocket-x5-pcie-gen5-ssd-storage-breaks-12398-mb-s-in-sequential-read-speed

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/90683/sabrent-is-aiming-to-push-pcie-gen-5-ssd-speeds-up-14000-mb/index.html

https://www.techpowerup.com/305734/sabrent-and-phison-collaborating-on-record-breaking-pcie-gen-5-ssd

[Holmes108]

Very cool but I'd still prefer current SSD's to come down in price. The fact that I still cant get 2tb for $100 (Canadian) annoys me.

[da na]

Damn, almost faster than a RAMdisk...

[Murasaki]

Gotta wonder how toasty that controller is

[LAwLz]

For consumers, I think we passed the threshold of "fast enough" sequential storage performance a long time ago.

Give me faster speeds at small bursts. This SSD is almost 300% faster than mine for sequential stuff, but only 13% faster for small random reads, which is what most everyday tasks requires anyway.

 

Size, price and performance metrics regarding random read performance is far more important than some ridiculously high sequential benchmarks if you ask me.

 

 

 

43 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

Damn, almost faster than a RAMdisk...

Maybe a really slow RAM disk.

I get 76GB/s read and 74GB/s writes to RAM. Not to mention the latency.

[da na]

46 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

For consumers, I think we passed the threshold of "fast enough" sequential storage performance a long time ago.

Give me faster speeds at small bursts. This SSD is almost 300% faster than mine for sequential stuff, but only 13% faster for small random reads, which is what most everyday tasks requires anyway.

 

Size, price and performance metrics regarding random read performance is far more important than some ridiculously high sequential benchmarks if you ask me.

 

 

 

Maybe a really slow RAM disk.

I get 76GB/s read and 74GB/s writes to RAM. Not to mention the latency.

Do you have DDR5 or something? 8 channel DDR4-2133 on my workstation gets 20gb/sec or so with ImDisk's RAMdisk tool.

[darknessblade]

2 hours ago, Holmes108 said:

Very cool but I'd still prefer current SSD's to come down in price. The fact that I still cant get 2tb for $100 (Canadian) annoys me.

there are a few 2TB M.2 SSD's for 100$, but these use QLC, and are quite bad in terms of quality.

 

[Holmes108]

12 minutes ago, darknessblade said:

there are a few 2TB M.2 SSD's for 100$, but these use QLC, and are quite bad in terms of quality.

 

 

Maybe I don't look in the right places, but between Amazon, Canada Computers and Best buy I've just never seen them. M.2 or 2.5 inch, even crappy ones (not that I want crappy lol). 

 

I just feel like for as long as we've been able to get external 2TB (and even more) HDD's for like $60-70, that by now the superior technology would have come down more than it has. It hurts me because I'm a data hoarder, lol. I have like 7TB attached to my Xbox, and I have two 1TB m.2's in my PC, and now I need MOAR lol. 

 

I do hoard some data on an external USB drive, and there's really nothing wrong with that setup currently.  But I did expect a bit more progress in this regard. I guess it's been bad timing too though, because during the same time, there's been chip shortages, big time inflation, etc etc...

[porina]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

For consumers, I think we passed the threshold of "fast enough" sequential storage performance a long time ago.

Where do you draw the line?

 

Recently I did buy a "high tier" PCIe 4.0 SSD even though I was using it in a 3.0 only system. I was balancing price and performance somewhat. It does seem like you either choose cheap SSD if you only care about capacity, or higher end 4.0 if you care about performance. 3.0 drives aren't any cheaper, at least not where I am. I wouldn't get early gen stuff for each anyway. Early 5.0 drives were hardly any faster than good 4.0 ones, and the one mentioned in OP is still far from saturating 5.0 so give it time to improve.

 

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Give me faster speeds at small bursts. This SSD is almost 300% faster than mine for sequential stuff, but only 13% faster for small random reads, which is what most everyday tasks requires anyway.

Still waiting for anything to come close to Optane. Easily >250MB/s at 4k q1t1 with those.

[Doobeedoo]

Cool, decent uplift in random reads too. Also again hoping DirectStorage becomes standard asap stop slacking devs.

[LAwLz]

3 hours ago, Mel0n. said:

Do you have DDR5 or something? 8 channel DDR4-2133 on my workstation gets 20gb/sec or so with ImDisk's RAMdisk tool.

Yes I do, but it should be way higher than 20GB/s even with DDR4.

Or maybe there is some bottleneck I am not thinking of when it comes to RAM disks. My 70+ GB/s number is the read and write speed to my RAM, not the read and write speed to a RAM disk, although I think the numbers would be more or less the same.

 

 

2 hours ago, porina said:

Where do you draw the line?

I'm not sure where I think the line is, but I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of users on this forum wouldn't notice a thing if their SSD dropped down to 1GB/s sequential read and write overnight. 

Consumer workloads are very rarely these big sequential reads or writes of several GB of data.

[Dabombinable]

2 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Yes I do, but it should be way higher than 20GB/s even with DDR4.

Or maybe there is some bottleneck I am not thinking of when it comes to RAM disks. My 70+ GB/s number is the read and write speed to my RAM, not the read and write speed to a RAM disk, although I think the numbers would be more or less the same.

 

 

I'm not sure where I think the line is, but I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of users on this forum wouldn't notice a thing if their SSD dropped down to 1GB/s sequential read and write overnight. 

Consumer workloads are very rarely these big sequential reads or writes of several GB of data.

I never noticed a difference between my Crucial P1, Gigabyte GP-AG41TB and Adata SX8200 Pro (pre and post RMA with inferior controller) in loading times or Windows responsiveness when using them as boot drives. And that's a significant difference in rated speeds.

[porina]

17 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Or maybe there is some bottleneck I am not thinking of when it comes to RAM disks.

I haven't ran one in a long time, but last time I did the speeds were disappointing. It was faster than a high end NVMe, but not by that much. What I'd guess is happening is that the software simply can't move user data to/from ram nearly as fast as ram itself can function. 

 

17 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I'm not sure where I think the line is, but I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of users on this forum wouldn't notice a thing if their SSD dropped down to 1GB/s sequential read and write overnight. 

Maybe. I can certainly feel the difference between a high end 3.0 NVMe and low end DRAM-less not using HMB, but that is possibly more due to random behaviour than sequential.

 

As a parallel, due to recent fiddling with monitor display settings when doing a capture for video, somehow my 144 Hz gaming display was running at 60 Hz. I didn't notice because of the game output itself. I only noticed because my GPU seemed quieter than normal and I checked with mouse pointer smoothness. It must have been in this state for some days...

[da na]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Yes I do, but it should be way higher than 20GB/s even with DDR4.

Or maybe there is some bottleneck I am not thinking of when it comes to RAM disks. My 70+ GB/s number is the read and write speed to my RAM, not the read and write speed to a RAM disk, although I think the numbers would be more or less the same.

 

 

I'm not sure where I think the line is, but I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of users on this forum wouldn't notice a thing if their SSD dropped down to 1GB/s sequential read and write overnight. 

Consumer workloads are very rarely these big sequential reads or writes of several GB of data.

I have a feeling the QPI memory management and ECC of my workstation significantly slow things down.

[darknessblade]

13 hours ago, Holmes108 said:

 

Maybe I don't look in the right places, but between Amazon, Canada Computers and Best buy I've just never seen them. M.2 or 2.5 inch, even crappy ones (not that I want crappy lol). 

 

The drives that are just below 100 euro in my country

-Patriot Memory P210 2TB

-Intenso Premium M.2 2TB

-Lexar NM620 2TB

 

The "WD Green SN350 2TB" is 110 euro.

 

If you want a "Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB" that one is 130 euro

------------

good drives rarely hit below 100 euro.

If I where to get one for cheap, I would jump on it as well.

[leadeater]

16 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Maybe a really slow RAM disk.

I get 76GB/s read and 74GB/s writes to RAM. Not to mention the latency.

 

15 hours ago, Mel0n. said:

Do you have DDR5 or something? 8 channel DDR4-2133 on my workstation gets 20gb/sec or so with ImDisk's RAMdisk tool.

I think that wasn't taking in to account the overhead in creating an actual ram disk and the performance achieved. But still you can achieve better than 20GB/s with a ram disk, there are a lot of depends. RAM disk will still eat any SSD for single thread small block size I/O though.

 

Most filesystems and other parts of the OS simply aren't written nor expected to be dealing with disk I/O rates this high so it's not like they are optimized for it, certainly not by default.

 

11 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Or maybe there is some bottleneck I am not thinking of when it comes to RAM disks. My 70+ GB/s number is the read and write speed to my RAM, not the read and write speed to a RAM disk, although I think the numbers would be more or less the same.

Sadly not, 30GB/s is on the high end for most systems. You'd expect far higher, I did too long ago, but it turns out reality is way different. RAM disks loose tons of performance compared to actual memory access.

[williamcll]

Slightly concerned how durable the TBWs are going to be if I constantly move files at full speed.

[porina]

12 hours ago, williamcll said:

Slightly concerned how durable the TBWs are going to be if I constantly move files at full speed.

Total endurance will still be related to flash type and capacity. Will you be writing that much more than now just because it is faster?

[mdk777]

On 3/10/2023 at 4:15 PM, porina said:

Maybe. I can certainly feel the difference between a high end 3.0 NVMe and low end DRAM-less not using HMB, but that is possibly more due to random behaviour than sequential.

Yup, that is what I notice. ANY SSD is a huge step up from a HDD.

I remember putting my first SSD in a laptop. The difference was huge.

 

Now, the difference in the NVME drives in my desktop (one 3.0 and one 4.0) comes down to the optimizations and random access.

 

Yes I noticed an improvement in responsiveness going to a WD 850 vs the first gen Sabrient.   

 

All in my imagination? Perhaps. 

 

IDK why review sites don't show a comparison of ALL SSD based on Random access as the primary factor.

 

I don't care if the sequential is 6500 or 7000.

 

I DO CARE if the random is 6000 or 12000 !!!

[wanderingfool2]

On 3/10/2023 at 9:04 AM, LAwLz said:

For consumers, I think we passed the threshold of "fast enough" sequential storage performance a long time ago.

Give me faster speeds at small bursts. This SSD is almost 300% faster than mine for sequential stuff, but only 13% faster for small random reads, which is what most everyday tasks requires anyway.

I'm going to say, "it depends".  If you don't game, I completely agree with that statement there won't be a noticeable impact.  Gone are the days where switching to a SSD save multiple seconds off of booting or opening of programs.  We tend to be bottlenecked in other areas, unless you really transfer files around most won't notice the difference...but then again, I'd argue if someone is moving around enough files to notice it that they likely also would appreciate a push for cheaper/TB vs faster.

 

If someone is into gaming, with the shift to DirectStorage the formula changes a bit.  While games aren't utilizing it now, after all most games are designed to run on the majority of systems, there will be a point where some games will require faster speeds.  At current speeds it could take a few seconds to load it into GPU memory, while new speeds only a second.  That is where the difference of 2-4 seconds vs 1 second can really start to come into play.  With that said, it's not something we will see in games for years I think (maybe not really ever as the majority of gamers won't have those setups).  It would be important on consoles, that's where I think consoles could really start making their niche again (running games that developers wouldn't dream of trying to get running on an average PC)

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

If someone is into gaming, with the shift to DirectStorage the formula changes a bit.  While games aren't utilizing it now, after all most games are designed to run on the majority of systems, there will be a point where some games will require faster speeds.  At current speeds it could take a few seconds to load it into GPU memory, while new speeds only a second.  That is where the difference of 2-4 seconds vs 1 second can really start to come into play.  With that said, it's not something we will see in games for years I think (maybe not really ever as the majority of gamers won't have those setups).  It would be important on consoles, that's where I think consoles could really start making their niche again (running games that developers wouldn't dream of trying to get running on an average PC)

I doubt games will require that much sequential read in the near future. I bet that pretty much all games, with maybe a handful of exceptions, will be more than fine with even a low end NVMe drive (that currently gets over 3GB/s sequential read) in the next, let's say 7 years. And by that point the current SSDs will be replaced anyway.

I also suspect that random read performance will be more important than sequential reads even with DirectStorage. With DirectStorage you will end up loading individual small pieces of textures and other data. DirectStorage will constantly be loading "small" files of maybe 20-50MB each. Not these 5GB+ files that will benefit from these sequential write speeds.

 

But we will see. 

[wanderingfool2]

14 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I doubt games will require that much sequential read in the near future. I bet that pretty much all games, with maybe a handful of exceptions, will be more than fine with even a low end NVMe drive (that currently gets over 3GB/s sequential read) in the next, let's say 7 years.

Oh yea, it's why I specified that I don't think we will see it in games for years and maybe never...I think there will be a large amount that always sees 2TB vs 1TB for the same price and goes for 2TB because it means they get "more".

 

I think you might still find some select games that utilize it (and likely ports of games from like the next gen Sony/Microsoft consoles)

 

Technology has to start somewhere, and things like this typically have a trickle down effect.  While we might not see crazy high speeds eventually it will make it's way down.

 

18 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

With DirectStorage you will end up loading individual small pieces of textures and other data. DirectStorage will constantly be loading "small" files of maybe 20-50MB each. Not these 5GB+ files that will benefit from these sequential write speeds.

At the 20-50MB mark though you start seeing those speeds though...or rather the reality will be somewhere in between.  Depending how they also form their texture-files they could have a lot of the data in the same area as well so it does become a sequential read op.

[Quackers101]

beta no retail, with all the fail.

 

anyways dont look at samsung and how much they are investing for fabs and new chips.

had to makeout with  intel fab growth, jk.