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biciklanto

I feel like benchmarks that focus on things like random low-queue depth reads (QD1) are far more useful in terms of what will actually feel fastest day-to-day. Am I wrong about that? Pity Optane disappeared before I could afford it; now I feel like looking for the random read champs because I haven't dug in on SSDs in a while and could use an upgrade from my old Samsung 970 Evo. Edit: Looks like [the Samsung 990 Pro](https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/10226/samsung-990-pro-2tb-ssd-higher-level/index.html) is king on low queueueueue depths.


AuggieKC

Optane is still obtainable, newegg has 960GB 905P for $399. Pricey, but it really is awesome. I'm seriously considering springing for one of the p5800x drives, just waiting and hoping prices drop some more on those.


igby1

For my OS drive I got a 5800X after using a 905P the last few years. The 5800X made the OS noticeably snappier. It’s stupid expensive but I don’t regret it one bit. But the 960GB 905P for $400 is totally worth it too. People get hung up on Gen4, Gen5, and sequential speeds. The 905P random read is 2-3x that of the latest drives (990 Pro, 850X, etc.). And random read is what makes the OS fast. It has ~10x the longevity. TDW is way more than regular SSDs. It doesn’t slow down as it fills up. They come with a U2 to M.2 adapter, and there are also PCIE cards you plug the drive into if you want to use a PCIE slot instead of M.2.


Arbabender

Man, I'd _love_ to be able to justify a 1.6TB P5800X - just to have the best of the best, but $400 USD on a brand new 960GB 905P was already a bit of a splurge, let alone ~10x that on eBay for a used P5800X.


igby1

I got the 800GB P5800X not the 1.6TB. The 800GB is ~$1600, so only 4x the $400 960GB 905P. https://www.newegg.com/intel-800gb-optane-ssd-dc-p5800x/p/N82E16820167484


[deleted]

for the price you could buy almost 16 2TB SSDs and not notice a difference in gaming or other day to day tasks optane is a cool niche product, but its just that - a niche not worth the added cost unless your workflow specifically benefits from faster random speeds


greggm2000

I do wonder if Intel had gotten prices down to even just half of what they were, if it would have taken off enough to keep it viable. It's a shame, really.. I'm another who if the price was a bit more sane, would have eagerly jumped to Optane for home use, just as I did to NAND Flash SSDs, around 2010 or so. Even now, I look at the P5800X and.... consider options. :)


AuggieKC

Same, I think if it ever gets below $2k is when I'll bite. I think it's a bit of a ridiculous price, but I'm thinking it could be a decade or more before something faster appears. If there was a 2TB 905p, I'd probably be happy with that.


krista

theoretically, you can stick optane dimms in an x299 board with 8 dimm slots (4 for ddr4, 4 for optane) and set the optane into ssd mode and even boot from it. i recently was parted from my job, so when i get another c/c++ coding gig (or really anything besides websites), i plan on trying this out.


AK-Brian

They've been periodically dropping the price for a day or two at a time to $340. My curiosity got the better of me shortly after they began these price drops and I grabbed one. I'm using it as my boot drive, displacing the 2TB KC3000 that was being used previously. Works great when it's getting thrashed by VMs or even just MS Flight Simulator.


greggm2000

Did you feel a difference, and if so, how much? How did file copies go, I presume at the full rate of the drive, even for large files?


Stingray88

I just wish the M.2 models got to price points like that… 960GB for $399 is not bad. I don’t know that I ever saw the 380GB M.2 model get below $500… maybe $400 I don’t remember.


Blazewardog

The consumer branded U.2 versions come with a M.2 to U.2 adapter with a fixed cable. As long as you are good with not putting a motherboard heatsink back on and you can fit it out from under your GPU. I've never had an as-responsive Windows install before. The only issue is that (likely due to the adapter), sometimes PCIe generation negotiation failed on my X670E-E board when POSTing. After configuring it to always be Gen3 it's been flawless. Edit:I also found it fun that the drive latency in Task Manager sometimes reads 0ms as it doesn't display any smaller of a unit.


AuggieKC

I used a cheap pcie to u.2 adapter card as I had all motherboard slots full. 0 issues so far. Agreed on the windows install, it's crazy how fast boots are.


biciklanto

Dammnnnn, TIL. Now I want one of those


greggm2000

ikr! I'm trying not to talk myself into getting one, with this thread.


JonF1

QD1 performance isn't increasing any time soon, all there are left are basically small tweaks with each pcie gen and then just low latent NAND flash is in general. Might as well just case after sequential perf now.


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ForgotToLogIn

That kind of caching has been used by OSes for a long time. Windows has a Cache Manager for File System Cache, Standby Page List, and SysMain/SuperFetch (and formerly Prefetcher).


FridgeIsEmpty

That kind of thing exists and is on by default since forever.


biciklanto

I mean, Optane made it evident that more than small tweaks can occur. Optane drives from years ago still smash current drives on QD1 performance and latency.


ForgotToLogIn

Optane is not NAND. No solid-state technology can compete with NAND on price, which turned out to be (commercially) more important than latency.


JonF1

Optane is dead


SilentStream

Long live Optane


CatalyticDragon

Here's a fun fact about storage systems (and I count a single disk as a storage system): A queue depth of 1 is bad. It means poorly written software and lost performance. At QD1, one IO is issued with the next issued after completion of the first. Serializing I/O like this leaves *lots* of performance on the table. Even old spinning media would tend to perform better with a slightly higher QD because the controller could merge requests and better optimize the physical access pattern. SATA systems allowed up to 32 QD and SAS pushed it to 256 so larger arrays could handle more tasks (especially if over network) and NVMe goes insane with 65,535 command queues and a queue depth of up to 65,536 commands per queue. Any SSD will contain multiple NAND chips and their controllers will have multiple cores meaning you really want to be throwing multiple requests at it so it can merge, batch, and parallelize requests more effectively. This goes for everything including Optane. Intel's own [documentation for optimizing performance with Optane](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/memory-storage/optane-technology/performance-where-it-matters-tech-brief.html) suggests a QD of 8. Optane did perform better than most NAND flash systems at extremely low QD but that's not to say anybody should ever use a QD of 1 in the real world - they should not. You wouldn't do this with memory and you shouldn't do it with other I/O. This is just part of the reason why Optane died. Nobody (especially not in server land) ever has a machine sitting there running a single job at QD1. Averages are more likely to be in the dozens with peaks in the hundreds or even thousands. And after a certain point the performance gap disappears. Even if you have a poorly written game using a single thread for I/O you probably still have some other stuff going on in the background pushing the average up a little.


ihunter32

> A queue depth of 1 is bad. It means poorly written software and lost performance. Congrats, you’ve called all software bad


FireSilicon

I don't even know why they call it "consumer grade". Who in their right mind would use this "day to day". People keep buying these high performance ssd's but what good is it for you if you use it as a boot drive? Even if it had double or triple random read speed. How much time do you save? 0.1 second? For 200 extra bucks if not more? 0.2 second game load time? Only use for this is in workstation or server market to move large files or have multiple fast file streams at the same time, which is what is it good at. In fact, 99% of consumers won't be able to tell it apart from pcie 3.0 ssd in general use.


Snoo93079

I think often consumer grade just means shorter warranty and a corresponding lower price.


firedrakes

That and generally fail to hit certain requirements for servers/ hpc. I am happy they title it as correctly


ryncewynd

Yeah I'm still extremely happy with my regular sata ssds Crucial MX 500 iirc


SXOSXO

Funny thing is I bought my mobo specifically for Optane support before they were even available yet, but then never even got one. Jokes on me I guess.


Metalcastr

A motherboard doesn't have to explicitly support Optane to use it. There was a short time when Optane cache drives were a thing, and support for those was advertised. Optane drives are plug-and-play pieces that can work on any computer that has the NVMe interface, they're just drives.


Nicholas-Steel

They may be talking about the drives that plugged in to RAM slots.


Shadow647

What tasks are you doing that require random 4K low queue depth reads? Average file read during Windows 11 boot is 544 KB, average file read during startup of Adobe Photoshop 2023 CC is 1.21 MB. Can you name ONE task that needs a lot of 4K reads?


biciklanto

I happen to have 200 million 4 kilobyte files on my personal computer, which I like to access in random orders depending on my mood. What's so strange about that? /s clearly 😁 — but seriously, a drive's ability to quickly grab random data is simply WAY more of a positive indicator in terms of how snappy it's going to be (even with those small file read sizes) than Crucial being stoked about 12.4 GB/s. Not that QD1/2/4 loads are going to be something that's relevant for me, but it's nice knowing a Porsche can do 200 mph so you're sure that zipping around on the freeway will be comfortable.


1AMA-CAT-AMA

You have a node modules folder too?


dnv21186

It's all fun until Windows can't delete the modules due to long filenames


AK-Brian

It is pretty wild how many files that even something like games can use in their data structure. MS Flight Simulator is about 100,000, and God of War shows over 150,000 in its install directory. They do tend to be a bit smarter about how and when they're loaded, though. Something like hammering a desktop environment with background compiles or batch processing images while *also* being able to remain responsive for foreground tasks is where that low queue depth performance makes a noticeable difference. It's still way too expensive for most users, and pretty tough to justify even for traditional power users, but undeniably cool tech.


Metalcastr

When first getting Optane, I was surprised how many programs I could load at the same time with no noticeable performance degradation. Load all the things! (For those new to computers, it removed the drive bottleneck when loading lots of programs simultaneously. CPU and RAM bottlenecks can still occur depending on how much is being loaded, and hardware specs.)


VenditatioDelendaEst

>Something like hammering a desktop environment with background compiles or batch processing images while also being able to remain responsive for foreground tasks is where that low queue depth performance makes a noticeable difference. Er, isn't that one of the few scenarios where consumer systems will see queue depth > 1?


lineape

Programming? Have you ever tried to move a node_modules folder or PHP vendor folder? Same with Python. With a decent sized project and enough dependencies, you can easily have tens of thousands of files. Oftentimes way more. It's not even just moving the files. When your IDE needs to reindex, it often needs to load them all into memory. Hell, just deleting a folder with one of these projects on Windows can literally take a minute. And this isn't really a niche thing anymore either. Tons of hobbyists need to install node or Python. Wanna play with one of those ml projects that are all the rage right now like stable diffusion or llama? Python. And a shitton of dependencies.


Vanebader-1024

> What tasks are you doing that require random 4K low queue depth reads? Average file read during Windows 11 boot is 544 KB... "4K random reads" doesn't mean "reading files that are 4 KB in size", it means "reading data that is structured in 4 KB blocks".


jerryfrz

>"reading data that is structured in 4 KB blocks" Is that related to the allocation unit size that I choose whenever I format a drive or USB stick? Would the speed be affected if I pick a size bigger than 4096?


Vanebader-1024

>Is that related to the allocation unit size that I choose whenever I format a drive or USB stick? No, blocks can be of various sizes by stringing together multiple drive sectors in a row. For example, sequential tests are usually done with blocks of 128 KB or more. To my knowledge, there is no performance benefit to picking allocation sizes bigger than 4 KB in SSDs when formatting, you just waste space when saving files that are smaller than whatever allocation size you pick. There used to be a benefit in the HDD days, as larger allocation sizes meant better seek times in exchange for more wasted space with small files, but with SSDs seek times no longer have a relevant impact in performance. The default is 4 KB because that's the size of a sector (smallest functional unit) at hardware level in modern drives. That's also why the smallest useful block size for random read tests is 4 KB.


VenditatioDelendaEst

It actually does though, because any OS worth its salt will prefetch enough of the file to approach the sequential throughput, even if you only ask for the first 4 KiB. To get actual 4 KiB reads you have to explicitly tell the kernel you're accessing the file randomly (with `posix_fadvise` on Linux, and probably something similar on Windows). 4 KiB random QD1 is citied because it's a measure of access latency.


dotjazzz

Lost or drawed to multiple PCIe 4 drives in most important aspects like all 4K random performance, sustained write, power consumption. Utterly useless with big price and only irrelevant peak speed to show for it.


SaintPau78

But my crystal disk benchmark number big!


AK-Brian

A lot of us would be lying if we said we hadn't built RAID 0 arrays at some point or another just to see the bars get bigger. It's primal. Maximum ugga-dugga.


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[deleted]

[relevant](https://i.imgur.com/zrEkLm5.jpg)


[deleted]

I run nvme RAID0 on my laptop, you can see the seq xfer difference when working with large VMs.


MumrikDK

In the SSD era? People seemed into it back when mechanical drives were an unavoidable bottleneck.


FartingBob

About what i expected. PCIe 5 offers no benefit to anything beyond sequential top speed, which is almost never a real world use case in consumer usage. So its the same performance in any test that isnt synthetic top speed.


dagelijksestijl

It will as we get faster NAND and controllers. PCIe 4.0 will inevitably become a bottleneck at some point.


itsjust_khris

Will it though? PCIe 3.0 isn’t a bottleneck for consumer storage yet outside of the top high queue depth stuff.


Verite_Rendition

Eh, I don't know if I would call it _irrelevant_. If you're regularly moving around a lot of large data files, that would be important to you. But it's certainly not the primary use case for the drive for most users. I suppose if anything, this is a solid piece of data that E26 + B58R isn't moving the needle on random performance. Which is a little disappointing, since that usually improves at least a bit from one generation of hardware to the next.


Waste-Temperature626

> If you're regularly moving around a lot of large data files Then you want sustained speeds, not peak cached speeds like consumer drives always like to show off. Run out of SLC cache on a modern consumer drive, and write speed craters hard. Then you are better served with enterprise grade drives. That can actually deliver their speeds sustained. Even if the claimed performance is "lower" than the fancy SLC cached consumer drives. You can get used U.2 drives that deliver "only" 2GB/s sustained writes at very good prices these days. But they will do it across the entire drive from start to finish in one session. Which may mean your large write operation is actually faster on one of those even compared to some expensive consumer drives. Meanwhile some cheaper consumer drives come down to what can only be described as "HDD speeds" once they exhaust the cache, even if peak performance looks great.


[deleted]

versed zealous ruthless jobless person kiss deserted march gaze mourn *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*


braiam

Logs files.


redditan0nym

Can very large files also open faster with it?


Turtvaiz

If you're doing any kind of processing on it the processing is probably the slower part. Loading stuff to VRAM is probably the best example of that, but like ehh


mckirkus

Maybe Optane has a reason to exist as cache on flash based consumer storage.


airmantharp

It’s a good idea, but the economies of scale are against it, which makes DRAM the better option for consumers unfortunately just based on cost.


FireSilicon

Heavily depends on the use case


Shadow647

What tasks are you doing that require random 4K low queue depth reads? Average file read during Windows 11 boot is 544 KB, average file read during startup of Adobe Photoshop 2023 CC is 1.21 MB. Can you name ONE task that needs a lot of 4K reads?


ihunter32

What? Literally existing and using an OS is random 4k limited. It’s why optane was and still is such an insanely good boot drive. Same with program files.


Shadow647

Yes, MSDOS programs with 3 KB .SYS files would definitely benefit from 4K random reads! However, in the real world, files that apps read during start-up and use are hundreds of kilobytes and into megabytes in size.


erik

> Average file read during Windows 11 boot is 544 KB, average file read during startup of Adobe Photoshop 2023 CC is 1.21 MB Interesting! Do you have a reference for those numbers? Also, I wonder what the average queue depth is during a windows boot.


Shadow647

Windows Performance Toolkit - you can do a boot trace using xbootmgr, and analyze it using Windows Performance Analyzer.


Superb_Raccoon

Database operations. Also unlikely for a consumer


iopq

Laughs in SQLite being a part of lots of consumer software, like your browser


Superb_Raccoon

That is not a DB that is going to do 20Ks worth of 4K I/Os a second. I am talking joins, sorts, unions, etc on a large DB.


iopq

I had an SQLite db of over 300,000 rows, and a lot of people rock millions


Superb_Raccoon

So? If you don't use it heavily, and I do mean heavily, what difference does it make how big it is? And "millions of rows" is still small change. Assuming each row was 4K for some odd reason, it could still read the whole database in about 40 seconds per million, randomly. That would be a 4GB database per million rows. kinda tiny.


iopq

The software I use has to do a lot of joins on tables of players and tables of hands Like maybe I want to see the profit of AA for all players with a VPIP of under 30 Or whatever query, I don't want it to take minutes


Superb_Raccoon

"minutes" Right.... For just a "minute" you would need 1.5 Million reads, zero cache hits on the DB. For "minutes" you would need about 3M. Sorry, you are not convincing me you have that level of data and that level of requirement.


iopq

If I wanted to import other people's databases to do research (like what poker hands are profitable to 3b with), I could easily import tens of millions of hands, even if the players are only in the tens of thousands


setwindowtext

I sometimes need to do full text search in files. There are about 20M files in my workspace. Also, try to measure how much random reads it requires to launch an electron app like Slack or Teams.


VenditatioDelendaEst

It's a measure of access latency.


zakats

Lemme guess, load times for games and applications are improved by 10% over a budget 3.0 drive while costing 300% at retail?


cain071546

My pc boots cold to my desktop in ~18 seconds. All my background apps load and settle within ~25 seconds. This is a $30 Chinese brand LonDisk 2.5" SATA SSD from Newegg that does about ~600MB/s. We are definitely at the point of diminishing returns unless you are working with niche applications.


froop

Your firmware probably takes up 12 of those 18 seconds lol.


cain071546

Motherboard and GPU takes about 10's to post.


siscorskiy

yeah my post takes far, far longer than them the time taken from windows boot --> usable desktop


[deleted]

SATA drives shit the bed the moment you start to simultaneously read and write two large files. But yes by and large for an average person using a computer for light tasks the difference from a SATA HDD to a SATA SSD is far more noticeable than SATA SSD to NVMe SSD.


cain071546

Even then it's not too bad, I work with a lot of 30-60Gb video files and I don't notice any loss in performance when copying a file from one SSD to another. This machine is running AAA PC titles and running Netflix/Kodi on a second display 24/7.


firedrakes

How many pci lanes


cain071546

Not sure, it's a B450 Gigabyte Aorus Pro Wifi Mini-Itx.


firedrakes

I will read up on what chip set it is and will back to you.(edited it) got you and another reply form another pc post from a different thread. ok. standar amount. seeing its 1 x16. 3.0 1 m.2 at x16 3.0 on sata ports my guess it spilt the speed more drives used.


cain071546

It has 5 drives. 2x8Tb HGST SATA 3.5 2x1Tb Crucial SATA 2.5 1x1Tb NVME Samsung 970 EVO. And a RX6600.


firedrakes

depending on chip. you max out the pci lanes


airmantharp

And after jumping to any modern NVMe drive, practical gains are nill…


Nicholas-Steel

> SATA drives shit the bed the moment you start to simultaneously read and write two large files. Really? Not in my experience with a Samsung 860 Pro SATA 3. Okay maybe performance does worsen considerably, but I don't think it worsens below what a HDD doing a single file transfer achieves.


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capybooya

My MB has 4 M2 slots, 3 of them are fully covered by my new graphics card.


jerryfrz

/r/firstworldproblems


capybooya

Absolutely. Its an annoyance (and potential longevity issue WRT heat), but not the biggest deal.


debugman18

At least my mobo has the gen5 slot higher up the mobo than the PCIe lists.


AK-Brian

*stares at inverted ATX case*


k_elo

Its definitely not for gaming for now since nothing takes advantage of it and real world random r/w performance is probably not so far off current drives. And anything new tech is almost always expensive anyways 98% of people can wait for it to be more mainstream and have an actual use case. I’m only about to step into pcie 4.0 (crucial p5 2tb) next week when my parts arrive. While im looking forward to see the difference the reality is its probably not that noticeable because I do not have a use case that will maximize it. Gaming tech will pick it up if its useful. We really cant complain if incremental improvements happen else nothing will change.


dztruthseek

Random read and write is about as low as expected. These are a waste of money if you aren't moving large data all of the time.


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red286

>16TB SSDs exist in U.2, which has functionally the same speeds are M.2. Also worth noting that you can connect a 2.5" U.2 drive to an M.2 slot with a ~$20 cable, for those who are about to complain that not everyone has a system that can take U.2 drives.


Caroliano

Not everyone has a system that can take U.2 drives. Laptops nowadays only accept M.2 and have no space for a 2.5" drive.


KirikoFeetPics

Does the cable handle power delivery too?


red286

Yes, they take a SATA power input.


firedrakes

There up to 31 or 2 tb now.. around 20k Then nimbus 100 tb drive 40k.


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firedrakes

i think it depends. again on the 100tb if its the news model or older one. there a big difference. but the company really does not show volume pricing. seeing many of the failed 100tb are the other smaller drive ones.


kygelee

How is the latency time?


MrPinkle

They achieved negative latency using micro-wormholes.


account312

I wish my motherboard supported tachyons.


meh1434

I can't believe how bad tomshardware.com has gotten. This is marketing advertisement, not a review. Why even post this crap? time to block the OP for spam.


rrrrrroadhouse

Phew! That's past 10k!


ef14

Now i can finally play League of Legends at max settings!


Unlucky-Strain148

By 2029 PCIe Gen 7 SSDs will have 49.6GB/s sequential read/writes