Friday, September 9th 2022
Not All First Generation PCIe 5.0 SSDs Will Offer the Same Performance
The first batch of PCIe 5.0 SSDs are all likely to be based on Phison's PS5026-E26 controller, which offers eight NAND channels, capable of supporting NAND speeds of up to 2400 MT/s. Phison's own figures for the controller are 13 GB/s writes and 12 GB/s reads, with up to 1.5 million random read IOPS and 2 million random write IOPS. However, as we've already seen from various SSD brands, many PCIe 5.0 SSDs won't exceed 10 GB/s when it comes to the sequential read/write speeds. This is because the current NAND flash simply isn't fast enough to saturate the PCIe 5.0 bus, which is capable of 15.75 GB/s. That said, Micron's 232-layer 3D NAND should be able to boost the performance up to 12.4 GB/s based on the numbers Gigabyte announced for their Aorus Gen 10000 SSD.
Based on an article over at Tom's Hardware, we shouldn't expect too many drives that exceed 10 GB/s sequential writes at launch, due to most drives using 176-layer 3D NAND flash, that is limited to 1600 MT/s. As such, it might be wise to hold off on buying the first generation of PCIe 5.0 drives and wait for better availability of 232-layer 3D NAND, as beyond Micron, SK Hynix is expected to have a 238-layer 3D NAND flash in the market sometime in the first half of 2023. If you're not really eager to have the fastest SSD out there for pure bragging rights, it would seem that mid 2023 might be the right time to get a PCIe 5.0 SSD.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
Based on an article over at Tom's Hardware, we shouldn't expect too many drives that exceed 10 GB/s sequential writes at launch, due to most drives using 176-layer 3D NAND flash, that is limited to 1600 MT/s. As such, it might be wise to hold off on buying the first generation of PCIe 5.0 drives and wait for better availability of 232-layer 3D NAND, as beyond Micron, SK Hynix is expected to have a 238-layer 3D NAND flash in the market sometime in the first half of 2023. If you're not really eager to have the fastest SSD out there for pure bragging rights, it would seem that mid 2023 might be the right time to get a PCIe 5.0 SSD.
55 Comments on Not All First Generation PCIe 5.0 SSDs Will Offer the Same Performance
to combat the massive heat output by the drives at max speed... pci 3.0 drives already get pretty hot and needs an aluminium heatsink on.
I ended up getting one of these for my KC3000 SSD, as it was throttling when used with the motherboard heatsinks.
thermalright.com/product/hr-09-2280/
We can have one on our CPU, one on our GPU, one on each NVME, and suddenly we have six DH15's in our PC's. "All Noctua" suddenly has a whole new meaning.
Needless to say that has been resolved with a SATA Samsung 850 EVO 250GB he got for free.
But now the question is would the PC actually be faster with a 15GB/s PCI-E 5.0 NVMe drive? Well, sure, but it’s a point of diminishing returns.
For everyday using and gaming none of these things matter. For enterprise or workstation use, sure, these new drives will matter. But for the average person just trying to play GTA V or Cyberpunk 2077 or whatever games the 4.0 vs 5.0 SSD is not going to matter. And they’re better off with the cheaper drive and putting a few extra bucks towards a different component.
www.kitguru.net/components/ssd-drives/matthew-wilson/computex-2019-corsair-launches-worlds-first-pcie-4-0-ssd-with-speeds-up-to-4950mb-s/
And this was before all the throttling become common knowledge. There was an article regarding Gigabyte getting 5000Mb's in "low temperatures" :D
not that it ever really went away, but in recent years it seems that many folks just can't get enough :)
Even just a single Gen 5 now......
Also mainstream platforms are always short on lanes.
Nothing is ready for it, and you still need to find some pretty specific scenarios where the limitations of even PCIe 3.0 storage are meaningful.
Yes, the differences are measurable - but is saving 0.8 seconds on a 45 second operation really going to make a difference to anyone in the real world?
Those files weight by the hundreds of GB to TB per file (it`s about 100-120 GB per minute).
Anyone else may pass.
Our company only works with 4K at the moment but I apply video-editing principles to workstations that work with site survey pointclouds. They're typically in the 500GB+ range per building and we deal with campuses occasionally.
NVMe SSDs are great for short projects but they rapidly get overwhelmed by this sort of stuff. When you're dealing with large datasets, you don't look at the headline figures, you look at the minimum sustained transfer rates. Reads are usually always high which is great for scrubbing but if you have to sit there and copy a stream the controller will overheat and throttle, your SLC cache will fill up, and it always comes down to the raw NAND speed which even PCIe 3.0 x2 is often fast enough for:
It's hinted at in this article, but newer NAND is coming which is the thing the video editing (and other large dataset) industries are most eagerly antipating, not PCIe 5.0. I still think that the make-or-break application that will justify PCIe 5.0 (and 4.0 for that matter) is DirectStorage but that's still a few years out in reality - even If it's launched tomorrow it will be like RTX where there aren't (m)any games that take full advantage of it for a good couple of years.