New PCIe Gen 5 controller coming to SSDs next year with high IOPS - SM2508

g67575 · 19 Sep 2023 at 20:37

I haven't made the jump yet to an NVME drive yet, but this caught my eye:

Silicon Motion Readies PCIe Gen5 SSD Platform with 3.5W Power Consumption [UPDATED]

www.anandtech.com

Over 2 million random read + write IOPS. Quite a jump from existing consumer SSDs.

This controller will used with laptop Gen 5 SSDs also:

Silicon Motion Reveals When Laptops With PCIe 5.0 SSDs Will Finally Arrive

Laptops with 14GB/s storage and circa 3.5W ultra-low power controller consumption are promised to arrive before too long.

hothardware.com

Most Gen 5 drives have so far used the Phison PS5026-E26 controller, so I imagine the specs will be all within the same ball park. This controller has a power consumption of 10w, somewhat higher than the upcoming controller.

So, might be worth waiting to see what drives become available next year.

I personally think PCIe Gen 6 is several years away, but I suppose these drives will be backwards compatible with most NVME capable motherboards.

We haven't seen a Gen 5 drive yet from Samsung either, I imagine they will come up with something decent also...

g67575 · 20 Sep 2023 at 03:55

Looking at a Samsung enterprise class Gen 5 SSD, the random 4K read IOPS is 2.5 million, but the random 4K write IOPS is 250,000 IOPS, so I think Samsung is likely to need a better controller to compete with Silicon Motion Gen 5 Controller.

Link:

Samsung PM1743 SSD Review

The Samsung PM1743 SSD stands as a testament to the power and potential of PCIe Gen5 SSDs, posting 1.25 million 4K IOPS from a single drive.

www.storagereview.com

Rroff · 20 Sep 2023 at 04:02

Frankly outside of specific applications you don't notice a lot of difference from older SSDs through to the latest high end NVMEs I find it hard to get excited by stuff like this - though one thing which was nice was changing my old NAS storage from a bunch of HDDs to using a NVME frontend with sync to HDD - when doing stuff like opening a folder with lots of thumbnails or even pulling a large video file off over gigabit let alone 2.5 or 10gb LAN there is a noticeable difference even to a 4 disc RAID of HDDs setup for both performance and redundancy.

Grim5 · 20 Sep 2023 at 05:01

g67575 said:
I haven't made the jump yet to an NVME drive yet, but this caught my eye:

Silicon Motion Readies PCIe Gen5 SSD Platform with 3.5W Power Consumption [UPDATED]

www.anandtech.com

Over 2 million random read + write IOPS. Quite a jump from existing consumer SSDs.

This controller will used with laptop Gen 5 SSDs also:

Silicon Motion Reveals When Laptops With PCIe 5.0 SSDs Will Finally Arrive

Laptops with 14GB/s storage and circa 3.5W ultra-low power controller consumption are promised to arrive before too long.

hothardware.com

Most Gen 5 drives have so far used the Phison PS5026-E26 controller, so I imagine the specs will be all within the same ball park. This controller has a power consumption of 10w, somewhat higher than the upcoming controller.

So, might be worth waiting to see what drives become available next year.

I personally think PCIe Gen 6 is several years away, but I suppose these drives will be backwards compatible with most NVME capable motherboards.

We haven't seen a Gen 5 drive yet from Samsung either, I imagine they will come up with something decent also...

the most important thing for new gen 5 ssd controllers is the reduction in power draw, performance doesnt matter much

RBImGuy · 21 Sep 2023 at 15:27

recently bought the samsung 990 pro 2tb.
made everything better
I been running samsung for years as the cloning utility just works.
seamless.

Not in a rush for next gen

g67575 · 21 Sep 2023 at 17:43

I think lots of people have already got Gen 4 NVME SSDs and the current Gen 5 SSDs haven't been a huge improvement so far, except for sequential read and write speeds which are somewhat higher. Some Gen 4 drives can already handle high sequential speeds of 6-7 GBps though, which seems more than enough.

The main thing that needs improvement is the random read and write speeds, just as we saw with the cancelled Intel Optane drives, and faster access times seem to be important also. From my point of view I might as well wait to see what the drives released next year can offer.

KompuKare · 21 Sep 2023 at 17:48

Wonder about power requirements though: reading is one thing but when writing NAND most surely use up a fair percentage of that total power consumption figure?

g67575 · 21 Sep 2023 at 17:53

Samsung was supposed to be working on a Gen 5 drive (but released the Samsung 990 Pro instead), I've wondering if they decided to hold off until they had something better to offer? They'll need something that can compete with the upcoming gen 5 Silicon Motion based drives.

Grim5 · 21 Sep 2023 at 19:36

Samsung was late to the gen4 party as well

g67575 · 21 Sep 2023 at 21:48

T-Force is going to release a Gen 5 drive at some point, I think probably this year:

From here:

The Alliance Between T-FORCE Z54A Series and InnoGrit Corporation Partnership Of The Top Technology Making Ultra-fast 14,000 MB/s GEN5 SSD a New Experience-TEAMGROUP

TEAMGROUP’s gaming brand, T-FORCE’s Z54A series, develops the pioneering new generation PCIe Gen5 SSD with outstanding performance, with read and write speeds up to 14,000 MB/s and 10,000 MB/s, respectively. TEAMGROUP exclusively cooperates with globe-leading advancing storage supplier...

www.teamgroupinc.com

It's using the IG5666 controller, which seems to be a bit faster than the Phison controller for random 4K read/writes.

EDIT - Although it doesn't seem to be that much faster than the Samsung 990 Pro, except for sequential read /writes.

The Samsung 990 Pro with a heatsink costs a fair bit more than the version without, a bit off-putting.

Grim5 · 21 Sep 2023 at 22:13

They're getting faster every month, I got burned with Gen 4 when I bought the first drives that came out only to watch it get blown away shortly after

So with gen5 I've held back and that is why, the market is moving very fast. The first Gen 5 drives were doing 10GB/s sequential reads and this year, basically every month a new drive comes out that's slightly faster than the last and now we're up to drives doing almost 15GB/s. If I had upgraded to Gen 5 when it first launched I'd now have a drive that's 40% to 50% slower than the drives launching today

So I'm going to continue to wait, as I mentioned faster drives are launching every month so I'll rather just wait for the market to mature and performance to stabilise

And of course waiting for power draw to come down. Many gen5 drives pull 15 watts under full sequential load; it doesn't sound like a lot but the heat density is high - for reference the latest iPhone 15 Pro phone while its playing the game Resident Evil Village, pumping 1080p visuals at 1200nits brightness on its 6.7 inch OLED screen, is only drawing 11 watts. That's an entire SoC device with a GPU, CPu, NVMe storage, Memory, very bright OLED screen rendering a modern game and it's using almost 50% less power than a tiny Gen 5 ssd

Murphy · 22 Sep 2023 at 11:46

g67575 said:
T-Force is going to release a Gen 5 drive at some point, I think probably this year:

Saw that image and my first thought was, WOW they need a 360 AIO just to keep the drive cool.

darael · 22 Sep 2023 at 18:46

Grim5 said:
They're getting faster every month, I got burned with Gen 4 when I bought the first drives that came out only to watch it get blown away shortly after

So with gen5 I've held back and that is why, the market is moving very fast. The first Gen 5 drives were doing 10GB/s sequential reads and this year, basically every month a new drive comes out that's slightly faster than the last and now we're up to drives doing almost 15GB/s. If I had upgraded to Gen 5 when it first launched I'd now have a drive that's 40% to 50% slower than the drives launching today

I don't understand why are pushing for such high speeds. In normal use, I highly doubt many people will notice the difference in speeds between a SATA or NVME SSD.

I'd much rather they focussed on increasing the TBW, of course this won't generate sales for the manufacturers.

KompuKare · 22 Sep 2023 at 19:22

darael said:
I don't understand why are pushing for such high speeds. In normal use, I highly doubt many people will notice the difference in speeds between a SATA or NVME SSD.

I'd much rather they focussed on increasing the TBW, of course this won't generate sales for the manufacturers.

TBW will cost them a lot more.
They can either use SLC/MLC or add redundancy. The trend is for low endurance drives using QLC.

But like always with storage, from UDMA33/UDMA66/133 to SATA 1/2/3, headlines burst rate figures sell.

darael · 22 Sep 2023 at 22:05

KompuKare said:
TBW will cost them a lot more.
They can either use SLC/MLC or add redundancy. The trend is for low endurance drives using QLC.

But like always with storage, from UDMA33/UDMA66/133 to SATA 1/2/3, headlines burst rate figures sell.

The thing with UDMA and SATA speeds, was that you actually noticed the difference - you could actually feel the difference in your computer's performance when you accidentally used a 40 pin IDE cable instead of an 80 pin one.

The reason I buy Samsung Pro drives is mainly for longevity. If Samsung charged a bit extra for better TBW, then I'd probably pay it for peace of mind,

g67575 · 23 Sep 2023 at 01:21

KompuKare said:
TBW will cost them a lot more.
They can either use SLC/MLC or add redundancy. The trend is for low endurance drives using QLC.

It sucks that QLC is becoming the norm.

Not much point in SSDs if the reliability + endurance isn't better than a hard disk, in my view.

I got a new SSD off Ebay (Crucial BX500 2TB) and replaced it because it had read errors every second, which caused pauses in games.

The replacement drive, a Samsung 2TB 840 Pro, has worked perfectly for over a year - MLC is much better (Wear Levelling = 98%). My main windows drive (~222GB) is MLC also, and that has lasted >5 years (Wear Levelling =61%).

eggbert · 30 Sep 2023 at 08:25

we could definitely do with a lower power gen 5 controller. A lot of The Phison based SSD‘s throttle quick smart without elaborate cooling.

srekal34 · 1 Oct 2023 at 09:31

g67575 said:
It sucks that QLC is becoming the norm.

Not much point in SSDs if the reliability + endurance isn't better than a hard disk, in my view.

I got a new SSD off Ebay (Crucial BX500 2TB) and replaced it because it had read errors every second, which caused pauses in games.

The replacement drive, a Samsung 2TB 840 Pro, has worked perfectly for over a year - MLC is much better (Wear Levelling = 98%). My main windows drive (~222GB) is MLC also, and that has lasted >5 years (Wear Levelling =61%).

Well I dont see a problem with QLC becoming a norm for data storage at home - its faster, more energy efficent and silent compared to HDD - and the difference compared to something like wd red pro is not that big anymore(£35/GB vs £20/GB).
I think there is a market for both TLC and QLC - TLC for system and performance uses, QLC for data storage. If the trend continues, they will be cheaper than HDD in a few years - I think they will be ideal in something like NAS with RAID 5 for redundancy.

g67575 · 14 Sep 2024 at 08:24

You can get QLC drives with decent endurance ratings now, I found one for my dad a few months ago. The Samsung drives had the best ratings. It's worth comparing the TBW rating of different brands and models.

But for a high end drive, it's probably not a good idea...

g67575 · 14 Sep 2024 at 08:56

No sign of a consumer class drive with 2 million random read/ random write IOPS yet, as least not that I could find. I think these will probably become available next year.

Models with the SM2508 controller could be the first.