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So, we have M.2 drives that can run around 7000/6000(ish) speeds, is there any new tech on the horizon to improve speeds or is it now all about capacities and durability?
Whats next for SSD?
- Thread starter chroniclard
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How fast is fast enough.
Personally I am happy with the speeds, I'd just like to see cheaper 4Tb, 6Tb and 8Tb NVMe SSDs start hitting the market.
No doubt it will happen it's only a matter of time.
Personally I am happy with the speeds, I'd just like to see cheaper 4Tb, 6Tb and 8Tb NVMe SSDs start hitting the market.
No doubt it will happen it's only a matter of time.
In general durability can only head downwards with push of QLC and bean counters and marketroids having dreams about PLC.
Hopefully increasing layer counts make manufacturers use TLC in at least some drives aiming for high capacity.
Because for all normal users that capacity per price would be the area with room for improvement, instead of pushing max performance further.
Hopefully increasing layer counts make manufacturers use TLC in at least some drives aiming for high capacity.
Because for all normal users that capacity per price would be the area with room for improvement, instead of pushing max performance further.
Instantaneous loading/saving would be fast enough.
Agreed with the rest on capacities. Reason I ask is I want to upgrade to a PCIE 4 M.2 drive and wondered if there are any tech improvements on the near horizon. Otherwise will just get a 1 or 2 TB Sabrent
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Depends on your definition of "on the horizon". PCIE-5 is coming, but I don't know when! That would allow faster maximum speeds, but it might be a while off yet. I'm not aware of anything else going on right now that will increase performance.
There is also PLC (Penta-Level Cell, 5 bits per cell compared to 4 for QLC or 3 for TLC) in development though, do not want.
I'd been hoping to replace even my storage drive with SSD at some point once the prices come down enough, but if I did it now only QLC based drives would be remotely viable in a price/capacity standpoint, and I wouldn't want one.
There is also PLC (Penta-Level Cell, 5 bits per cell compared to 4 for QLC or 3 for TLC) in development though, do not want.
I'd been hoping to replace even my storage drive with SSD at some point once the prices come down enough, but if I did it now only QLC based drives would be remotely viable in a price/capacity standpoint, and I wouldn't want one.
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Yeah, sounds like a Sabrent is fine then and maybe a 4TB SATA SSD(Samsung MLC V-NAND seems ok to me?) to replace my last physical drive. 
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Samsung MLC V-NAND is an odd one - it doesn't really tell you what the specific storage technology is, you need to look at the rest of the product name to find out
Traditionally MLC (Multi-Level Cell) was the next step after SLC and stored two bits per cell - but I'd be surprised if there are any 4 Tb SATA SSD's on the market using that.
The actual drives on the market from Samsung in that capacity right now are the 860 EVO, the 870 EVO, and the 870 QVO. All listed as using "MLC V-NAND".
The EVO ones are actually TLC (3 bits per cell) and are pretty good - certainly good enough as a storage drive.
The QVO is QLC (4 bits per cell) which may or may not be fine for you depending on what you want to do with it. If you throw a sustained write workload at that (e.g. copying over all your data from another drive) it will be fine until the SLC cache is exhausted - about 87 Gb on the Samsung 860 or 870 QVO - then the write performance drops off a cliff, down to about 160 MB/s, until it has chance to flush the SLC cache out to MLC cells.
That's the reason I won't buy any QLC based drive as a storage drive, since the workload I'd be subjecting it to would hit that limit and the performance would drop to the point where it isn't any better than a mechanical hard drive!
Traditionally MLC (Multi-Level Cell) was the next step after SLC and stored two bits per cell - but I'd be surprised if there are any 4 Tb SATA SSD's on the market using that.
The actual drives on the market from Samsung in that capacity right now are the 860 EVO, the 870 EVO, and the 870 QVO. All listed as using "MLC V-NAND".
The EVO ones are actually TLC (3 bits per cell) and are pretty good - certainly good enough as a storage drive.
The QVO is QLC (4 bits per cell) which may or may not be fine for you depending on what you want to do with it. If you throw a sustained write workload at that (e.g. copying over all your data from another drive) it will be fine until the SLC cache is exhausted - about 87 Gb on the Samsung 860 or 870 QVO - then the write performance drops off a cliff, down to about 160 MB/s, until it has chance to flush the SLC cache out to MLC cells.
That's the reason I won't buy any QLC based drive as a storage drive, since the workload I'd be subjecting it to would hit that limit and the performance would drop to the point where it isn't any better than a mechanical hard drive!
870 QVO says "Samsung V-NAND 4bit MLC", probably be fine for my usage.
Just don't use it as some cold storage drive with longer periods without power.870 QVO says "Samsung V-NAND 4bit MLC", probably be fine for my usage.
Pretty sure controller has to monitor and when needed refresh data to avoid problems from QLC's lack of tolerance for charge degradation.
The only disappointing thing about the newer SSD drives is that whilst being 4x faster than SATA SSDs, they don't boot/load programs 4x faster. I get the 4K reads are what matter but NVME is far ahead of SATA SSDs in that aspect right? Yet boot times are only like a few seconds difference.
Only benefit so far is the small sizes of the M.2 sticks.
Only benefit so far is the small sizes of the M.2 sticks.
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Yeah there isn't much real-world benefit right now. What we need is for software to be optimised to take advantage of SSDs properly. Right now a lot of stuff will be coded like this:
OK so we need to read 100 files from disk
Read a file. Done.
Read a file. Done.
Read a file. Done.
Read a file. Done.
...
Read a file. Done.
100 files one after another. For a mechanical hard drive that makes sense, since if you try to read two files at once (or more) and they are located in different sectors on the disk, the drive will go crazy seeking back and forth and be much slower than loading one at a time.
An SSD on the other hand needs the opposite - to actually full take advantage of the available performance, it needs a high queue depth. Forget trying to load files one after another - spawn a lot of worker threads, try to load them all at the same time. The better the SSD is, the faster that will finish.
OK so we need to read 100 files from disk
Read a file. Done.
Read a file. Done.
Read a file. Done.
Read a file. Done.
...
Read a file. Done.
100 files one after another. For a mechanical hard drive that makes sense, since if you try to read two files at once (or more) and they are located in different sectors on the disk, the drive will go crazy seeking back and forth and be much slower than loading one at a time.
An SSD on the other hand needs the opposite - to actually full take advantage of the available performance, it needs a high queue depth. Forget trying to load files one after another - spawn a lot of worker threads, try to load them all at the same time. The better the SSD is, the faster that will finish.
Actually loading of modern Windows is as much loading single sequential file as its loading different small files.
It's just that reading that data from drive is only small part of getting PC powered on and to OS desktop.
First hardware has to initialize itself (that POST) unless things are skipped before booting of OS can start.
And while that Windows kernel state is resumed from hibernation file, other software and data needs initializing and processing.
NVMe SSD isn't that much faster than SATA SSD in low queue depth/thread count randoms, because it's that NAND Flash itself bottlenecking random accesses.
Despite of lacking mechanical parts it's simply magnitudes slower than RAM.
For the rest above message.
Though booting can still happen lot faster than with SATA SSD:
https://www.realhardwarereviews.com/silicon-power-us70-1tb-review/9/
(test system being 24 core Threadripper likely decreases some processing bottlenecks)
Got any details on that loading single sequential file thing? Because the single biggest file in a windows install is WindowsCodecsRaw.dll, a camera handling codec pack, at roughly 30MB.
It's also not only about how fast the system boots, like you say a lot of the time is spent in POST, it's about how quickly data can be fetched from the drive when it's needed, like when launching programs or loading files. That's why people notice so much when going from spinning rust to SSD'd, 80 iOPS would be considered good for a typical SATA HDD whereas even the worst SSD's from 12 years ago could hit 350 iOPS.
Standard Windows settings boot loads state of Windows itself from hibernation file.
It's just that user session/open program data etc from RAM isn't stored into it.
https://lifehacker.com/shutting-down-windows-10-doesnt-actually-shut-down-wind-1825532376
That article's not about loading a single sequential file, it's about Windows hibernation. I guess what you're referring to is 'Fast Startup', if so that doesn't save the entire session or load the entire hibernation file, it only save the kernel state to disk meaning all userspace programs have to be re-loaded, once again depending more on how many requests can be serviced (iOPS) rather than throughput.
Really? Guess I've been misled. I knew the IOPS reports were on QD32 but I thought NVME had an advantage in the single queue depth which what most workloads are like.
Interesting... will have to go back and do some more reading.
When we can have ram access and speed and persistent storage.
Intel has Optane which would could be the thing but it stops for consumers at the cost/size ratio.
Installed a new ssd m.2 disk today replacing my samsung 960evo with a samsung 980 pro 500gb pcie-4.
I cant say it feels slow using the computer.