SSD Fetish

jarablue said:

I know benchmarks are higher but real world performance like opening apps and game loading. I read several people state that there is pretty much no difference between optane and a wd770 in their system.

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Alright. So first off, I'm not trying to help your argument with some Internet user. I'm trying to tell you that Optane beats the shit out of even PCIe 5.0 SSDs because the benefit is in the nature of the chips, not the interface. The latency is where the benefit is. Just like SSDs beat the shit out of HDDs because the latency went down 4,000 to 40,000 times. Optane RULES latency compared to regular NAND flash SSDs so perhaps that helps picturing the difference.

Optane would be a most awesome system drive because that gets accessed all the time, at Q1T1, and provide better system response latency. But really unless you have a shitload of things going on it would be a total waste. I have a bunch of Samsung 980PROs and run multiple SQL Server instances, VMs, just workstation loads and have zero complaints. I'd still take an Optane because more is always better.

I do not mean to sound rude but getting something like Optane.. you'd know if you needed it by osmosis, by your needs and research. Really no offense, just my opinion.

Games, it'd depend on the game as it always does. I don't know of any games that would be much different because they're on a Opteron.
For a regular desktop user opening apps and a typical game, I'd challenge them to tell the difference between a SATA SSD and a NVM.e.

It's not a worthy argument to hold and I'm not here to hold it for you. I'm just trying to provide perspective. Comparing "IOPS" at workloads that will never be hit rather than the typical ones is already a losing bet.. Q1T1 is always very humbling. It's just like DRAM where it's just very, very hard to push down latency. DDR5 latency isn't all that much more awesome than DDR3. Bandwidth is better yes, but that matters less than you think. Same with IOPS at >Q1T1. There are just physical limits.

Should you "get one"? An optane? I didn't think you can even still buy them. You're fine with any bog standard SSD. SATA by now should be avoided unless that's the only interface you have. But any quality NVMe will serve you perfectly well. Anything but trash tier.

Great thanks!

The Tom's Hardware review also includes things like game loading time where Optane appears to have a clear advantage over other SSDs.

I'd also take a guess that the system would feel more responsive if you were using it side by side with another system, but I wouldn't expect the difference to be as marked as the difference between HDD and SSD.

The reality is that with I/O performance improved so much we're starting to move the bottleneck around more. It's a good problem to have, but it's going to take some work to fix it.

I was running an Optane 905p for awhile(I only gave it up because it wouldn't fit in my new SFF build), and even though it was Gen 3 I noticed it in real world when used as a system drive over a high-end gen4 ssd. It was most noticeable in boot up, logging into the desktop, and when doing updates, but was noticeable just in day-to-day usage as well. I miss the feeling of instantaneousness when opening up apps or booting the system but it's not enough of a difference for me to give up my new 10L case. I'll probably repurpose my optane drives to cache drives to my nas, and make use of their write endurance.

Optane had the issue that it never came down to easy prices at good sizes, before mostly becoming obsolete.

The pcie 4 Optane version has twice the random IOPS as the newest flash drives, but half the transfer rate, and the pcie 3 optane drives are about a fifth the transfer rate. Once you get to block sizes of 128kb or so, there is no way for an Optane drive to win this any longer, as a modern flash drive exceeds its max transfer rate.

4k random is important due to memory page sizes, but that is mainly important if you are either swapping to disk for lack of memory, or the read is through a mapped view and really could have been much smaller. It is not going to reduce your wait a lot in cases where you are waiting on a lot of data to transfer, but it is the dominant factor in how responsive the computer will be if you are out of main memory.

Or as stated elsewhere:
"The biggest addition is the Crucial T705 PCIe 5.0 SSD, which now reigns as the fastest overall drive that we've tested. Intel's Optane still has faster 4K QD1 random IO, but it lags far behind in other areas. We also added a few new M.2 2230 drives that we've tested (but haven't yet officially reviewed)."

Really, they needed an interface somewhere between ram and the pcie bus in speed, and likely applications which assume its use, to make that work out well. They should have targeted a console or similar first, or a ram replacement for phones, or something like that in a device they could control more, in my opinion.

It did take a while, but if you make a copy of a file to the same drive, or load a game with many GB of data into ram to run it (or any application with a large data set it loads to ram in large blocks), that is faster by a good margin on most pcie5 drives, and random 4k IO has become much closer. That could be an interesting choice, but not when one of the options is a fifth the capacity at three times the price. It becomes something you would rarely want in that case, and that is where they were. They could probably modernize it again if they wanted to continue production, but the performance gap as an SSD is not big enough that it is easy to justify that price, and those capacities are not high for storage.

If you do need the 4k random IOPS, enterprise SSDs are much higher than even Optane manages (high hundreds of thousands to millions), and not more expensive. It is a very narrow use case where you are latency bound for limited reads, and are not willing to spring for the RAM to do it there. That is not a high priced market for the most part as the good solution is RAM, so it was in a really awkward place in terms of market.

Lots of content on L1 Techs' YT channel about Optane and what it's (was) good at, if anyone is interested.

jarablue said:

I know benchmarks are higher but real world performance like opening apps and game loading. I read several people state that there is pretty much no difference between optane and a wd770 in their system.

Like if I click on edge, will it noticeably be faster opening up? Or game loading other than half a second more? From what I read, it points to no.

I'm thinking of getting one but if I only see performance increases in software benchmarks and not real world stuff I use in win11. I see no point in pursuing it. The drive will be going into a win11 desktop gaming rig. So no server stuff, database stuff or video encoding. No benchmarking. Just everyday game/web browsing use.

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Your use case is simple enough that we can just directly answer this.

MS Edge will generally already be in memory by default, so there should be no impact from your SSD when you click the button. The initial load into RAM will be on the order of 100MB of sequential data and not by page, so will be limited by the interface speed (a 990 will be similar to but ever so slightly slower than a P5800X with Optane, and both will be beat by a pcie 5 drive, but this will happen shortly after booting in most cases, not when you click it).

Most games compress data, so there is a significant CPU wait. Read from disk is usually sequential, so the transfer speed and not read latency is what matters during a long load from disk. If the game reads small sections only in order to reduce memory use, that would work better on an Optane drive, so the P5800X may have a significant advantage if there are microstutters while playing as things are loaded (so long as they are small things). Any even somewhat larger reads will complete faster on a pcie5 drive, but the next best thing is Optane.

A P5800X is the fastest pcie4 drive you can get, but the thing is, buying a P5800X means spending enough money that you could instead buy a new computer with a pcie5 slot, plus a generally faster drive with five times the space. It would make a very questionable upgrade for a desktop for that reason alone.

In the past it could have been more worth it, but modern consumer level drives have mostly closed this gap in the last few months to a year, and it was never a great deal for a desktop SSD. It could have been a money is no object purchase a while ago, but these days there are both better and cheaper options for the use you plan to put it, so it would just be needlessly expensive.

This is probably better for that comparison, as they included an older pcie5 drive and Optane for benchmarks:

It shows the kind of thing each wins, and how close that margin has become, with the note that flash SSDs have continued to get faster since that point (that was one of the first pcie 5 drives).

Edit:
Also worth mentioning if you want faster load times in practice, is that Windows will use available RAM as a cache for your drive (automatically, you do not need an external program for this).

My computers have 41GB and 73GB of cached data respectively according to Windows, as they are currently using more like 20GB than all of ram for programs. Anything loading out of there is going to be faster than any SSD could be, so if you are playing the same game regularly, you can easily end up not really touching that SSD except for data it wants to write.

Silicon Motion has a fancy video for their SMI2508 PCI-e 5.0 controller up. TSMC 6nm (vs 12nm for virtually all of the previous gen stuff), and we've known about this controller since 2023.

But still not many clues when drives using it will actually ship.


View: https://youtu.be/0DLQ2sPk8TM?si=rX3_tcFyiH0ENRZ5

Spoke too soon. Coming Q4 2024 says Tom’s Hardware.

Phison E31T isn't a high end controller like the E26, but as it's on TSMC 6nm, only 4 channels, and is DRAMless, very curious on power consumption. Again not going to see til Q4 2024.

My current NVMe boot disk (1TB Mushkin Pilot PCIe 3.0 model from 2019) is starting to have bit flip errors, and I'm tired of doing recovery on it. The rest of the system has been solid and the SSD is old so I'd like to replace the drive sooner rather than later, maybe be primed to buy on Prime Day (ha ha, bad pun.)

The last SSD I needed to buy was for a system that only supported PCIe 3.0 NVMe disks, so I got an SK Hynix P31 Gold and was very happy with it. I presume the P41 Platinum is still somewhere in the ballpark of decent. I'm looking for the intersection of price/performance with the following requirements:

NVMe 4.0 M.2 in 2280 form factor
TLC NAND of some flavor. As a boot drive, I don't want to consider QLC
2 TB, would consider a 4 TB non-QLC drive for the right price
DRAM cache preferred, but pseudo-SLC is potentially tolerable?
Doesn't run so hot it needs an elaborate heat sink (so no PCIe 5.0, plus my x570 board wouldn't support 5.0 anyway.)

So far I've got the following short list:

SK Hynix P41 Platinum 2 TB ($145 with current sale)
WD Black SN770 2 TB ($133, but seems to embody some compromises in heat and cache)
WD Black SN850X 2 TB ($160 -- is the 4 TB also TLC?)
Samsung 990 Pro 2 TB ($170 - as always, seems speedy but is the most expensive)
Samsung 990 Evo 2 TB ($130 -- similar limitations to the WD SN770)

Am I missing anything obvious? Any models to avoid?

Nevarre said:

Am I missing anything obvious?

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Solidigm is the new company spun out of the Intel/SK Hynix partnership. Their P44 Pro is the current version of the P41 Platinum and should be competitively priced, unless something has happened recently.

I've been very happy with my HP FX900 Pro for the last 6 months or so. It's toward the cheaper end of your list but has a 5 year warranty and good mix of efficiency and performance. It has a DRAM cache and SLC and TLC.

Ardax said:

Solidigm is the new company spun out of the Intel/SK Hynix partnership. Their P44 Pro is the current version of the P41 Platinum and should be competitively priced, unless something has happened recently.

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For reasons that aren't entirely clear, the P44 Pro is on the high end of pricing everywhere and one reason why I didn't look at it very closely ($190 @ Newegg, $210 @ Amazon, but every other vendor is somewhere roughly in that range) excepting when you buy through Walmart.com fulfilled by Newegg. They're selling it for $120 + free shipping. I was motivated by your post to do some more cross-checking of prices.

It should show up next week.

Performance should be on that Samsung 990Pro / WD SN850X tier, for the price of a midrange SSD. So heads up if anyone else is looking for one and wants to save $.

Paladin said:

I've been very happy with my HP FX900 Pro for the last 6 months or so. It's toward the cheaper end of your list but has a 5 year warranty and good mix of efficiency and performance. It has a DRAM cache and SLC and TLC.

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I did forget about those. That would be another solid option.

Nevarre said:

For reasons that aren't entirely clear, the P44 Pro is on the high end of pricing everywhere

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That's wild. I bought mine from Amazon last May for $130 for the 2TB drive. At the time the P41 Platinum drives were really expensive. Honestly though it's pretty hard to go wrong with any of them.

We might be in a strange pre-Prime Day pricing regime right now. The P31 Gold 1TB is $95 today but when I bought it a little over a year ago it was $62 (Amazon for both.) Flash is volatile but not that volatile and that's for a drive in the class where competitors are still in that $60-70 ball-park mostly. There are other models where the pricing doesn't quite make as much sense as it seems like it should.

Nevarre said:

We might be in a strange pre-Prime Day pricing regime right now. The P31 Gold 1TB is $95 today but when I bought it a little over a year ago it was $62 (Amazon for both.) Flash is volatile but not that volatile and that's for a drive in the class where competitors are still in that $60-70 ball-park mostly. There are other models where the pricing doesn't quite make as much sense as it seems like it should.

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The Flash cartel also spent the winter trying to force prices up.

Hah I got a Teamgroup 4TB NVMe PCIe 3 for... $160 on 10/2/23. It's $230 now. It's fantastic for churning torrents.

hansmuff said:

Hah I got a Teamgroup 4TB NVMe PCIe 3 for... $160 on 10/2/23. It's $230 now. It's fantastic for churning torrents.

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The MP34? I bought one of those last year as well.