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  • meacupla - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    Okay, well it seems evident that gen5 NVMe SSDs are going to require chonky heatsinks.

    Are SSD manufacturers going to release cooler running versions?
    or will laptop manufacturers have to resort to slower gen3/4 SSDs for their gaming/workstation lineup?
    or will laptop manufacturers just go ham and run a heatpipe cooler for a gen5 SSD for their gaming/workstation lineup?
  • NextGen_Gamer - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    See, what I got out of watching Linus Tech Tips was the exact opposite. Show me a motherboard with M.2 slots on it that are *NOT* covered by the built-in motherboard heatsink/heatshield/apparatus (however you want to call it). Cause that is that Linus tested: the T700 with it's chonky heatsink, and then without covered by the standard motherboard one. And both showed the same temperatures after 15 minutes of stress testing.
  • meacupla - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    Okay, but that's on desktop mobos.
    I am talking about when these are inside laptops

    And the timing of LTT youtube channel getting hacked is hilarious.
  • Techie2 - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    The ridiculous massive heatsinks are NOT required for the gen 5 SSDs. These heatsinks are a GIMMICK to try and sway people who are technically challenged. It allows SSD makers to increase price and profits. In most cases the mobo maker supplied heatsink is all that is needed.
  • Otritus - Monday, March 27, 2023 - link

    Except for the fact that SSD power consumption is on the rise. Those faster reads and writes aren’t coming for free. A higher performance controller will consume higher power. Power consumption can only go down with node shrinks, but Denard scaling being dead means efficiency gains are minimal. SSDs pulling 20-30 watts aren’t that far off in the direction the industry is moving. Heat sinks if not already vital will be vital.
  • Samus - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    You are right. On my TUF Z690, there is one M2 slot (out of four) that would allow a drive with a heatsink like that. Alas it's only PCIe 4.0 anyway.
  • lopri - Sunday, March 26, 2023 - link

    NVME drives can get to 90C+ without adequate air flow. It is better safe than sorry.
  • Sonic01 - Friday, March 24, 2023 - link

    I imagine it will go the same route as CPU's, thermal based throttling. possibly as you say being intergrated to the shared heatpipe solutions currently used in laptops.
  • shabby - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    We want higher capacities not faster speeds.
  • RU482 - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    high capacity M.2? why not just go 2.5"? 30.72TB Micron 9400
  • shabby - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    $140 per Tb price needs to come down.
  • Sonic01 - Friday, March 24, 2023 - link

    because laptops?
  • Homer10 - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    Higher capacities for the big data drive (where you store your videos, music, and pictures, but smaller sizes for the boot drive.
  • PeachNCream - Friday, March 24, 2023 - link

    Dual drive solutions require additional thought on my part. I want my computer to STFU and do stuff, not require tinkering and diddling around to put things where they belong. I've got better things to waste my time on so I prefer one larger capacity drive and speed is less important. Now endurance, though, I would take that over capacity or speed as a priority but even that is a compromise given how we ended up settling on short-lifespan NAND as our primary consumer storage technology.
  • Homer10 - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    What we really want is a super fast, but smaller (500G - 1 TB) size for a boot drive, and a somewhat slower big drive (2TB - 4TB) to hold the video, and music collection. All the efforts to increase speed seems to be on the bigger SSDs. What we need are a 500G SSD boot drive with 15Gbyt/sec, and a 4TB SSD big drive that goes at 6GB/sec. This would make for a nice combo. Go ahead and price the smaller fast drive at a fairly high value. The boot drive is where you want the speed.
  • name99 - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    What "we" want seems all over the place...

    Because every time people complain about the cost of Mac SSD storage I point out that they can buy EXACTLY what you claim to want
    - small super fast boot SSD (internal)
    - as large as you like, slower (choose anything from USB-3 QLC to high speed thunderbolt) external SSD
    That's how I configure my macs, and I've been happy with it for 10+ years.

    And I'm always met with waves of rage at this suggestion, claiming that this is a completely unacceptable configuration damned by the gods and going against the holy words of Bill, Linus, and Steve.

    So...
  • Wereweeb - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    I like having a laptop that doesn't require a dongle attached to dongles. I also like having a laptop that's repairable and whose SSD I can upgrade myself or pay anyone who knows tech to install. I also like having a laptop which allows me to choose between the widely used OS or the best existing open-source OS, instead of locking me into some bizarre niche proprietary one. And so on, and so on...
  • mode_13h - Friday, March 24, 2023 - link

    > - small super fast boot SSD (internal)

    The biggest issue with that is how SSD write-endurance is coupled to capacity. Therefore, I'd tend to avoid going too small with the boot, swap, and /tmp/ drive. That said, I'm not a mac user.
  • Threska - Friday, March 24, 2023 - link

    Overprovisioning on such drives help.
  • meacupla - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    No, what is ideal for OS and programs is a drive with fast random read/write.
    sequential read write is getting to a point where it's not a useful metric for drive performance in home PCs.
  • Wereweeb - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    You don't really save much money by going with an SSD with lower sequential speeds. The current higher costs of PCIe 5.0 SSD's are mostly about ammortising high R&D and tooling costs - once that's done their prices will start decreasing sharply. So if you wait for a little while you'll be able to get a PCIe 5.0 SSD for the high capacity drive.

    But really, you don't need high sequential speeds for a video and music drive, and high sequentials also don't actually improve a boot drive's performance, since it won't be moving massive files constantly. Sequentials are better for big constant data streams, like gaming in 4K or video editing. If you don't do those you don't need PCIe 5.0.

    For a snappier boot drive you really want lower latencies, so that it takes less time for the processor to get the data it needs from the SSD. That means, you want an SLC or Optane SSD. Also, you don't really need to buy two separate SSD's for that, it'd be overall cheaper to build just one SSD with tons of NAND, and use some of that NAND in pseudo-SLC mode. (Or pair lots of NAND with some Optane).

    Lo and behold, a few years ago that's exactly what the FuzeDrive by Enmotus and the Intel H10 did. Enmotus built a hybrid SLC-QLC SSD and had the software necessary to manage the data properly, keeping the latency-sensitive "hot data" in the low-latency SLC section. Intel did something similar with the H10, except they used Optane memory, which has lower latencies than SLC SSD's but added a LOT to the cost.

    You know what Intel's Optane-NAND SSD's and the Enmotus FuzeDrive have in common? Intel's Optane business was shut down, and Enmotus is no more. No one bought these "optimised SSD's".

    "Low capacities, rated at the same sequential speeds, but for more money?! That's a scam!" they said.

    No one wants a "fast and snappy boot drive" to pair with a "big slow SSD", because no one cares enough to bother learning how they can get that, who can provide them with that, and then to actually pay double or more $/GB to actually have it.

    And that's because any NVME SSD, even a PCIe 3.0 one that uses QLC and has no DRAM, is already "snappy" and "high capacity" enough for everyone not to really care about these things. Since everyone buys them, more of them are manufactured, and economies of scale means they get even cheaper in $/GB compared to niche competitors.

    The only exception is that PCIe 5.0 drives are REALLY good for video editing and will be good for high-res high-framerate gaming, which is the only reason why anyone is buying PCIe 5.0 drives in the first place.
  • nandnandnand - Friday, March 24, 2023 - link

    What "we" really want is a non-volatile storage technology superior to NAND and DRAM.
  • stephenbrooks - Friday, March 24, 2023 - link

    The bigger capacity drives are faster because of NAND parallelism.
  • ballsystemlord - Thursday, March 23, 2023 - link

    Did anyone notice that these drives are rated a bit low on endurance?
    Like Corsair's MP510 1TB drive is rated at 1700TBW according to AT.
  • FunBunny2 - Friday, March 24, 2023 - link

    "Did anyone notice that these drives are rated a bit low on endurance?"

    I'll ask again: have we not gotten TLC/QLC, in particular, NAND on current node(s) rather than the legacy 20/30/40 (much more rugged) nodes we were promised? ok, just kidding.
  • JTWrenn - Friday, March 24, 2023 - link

    This feels like we are heading in the wrong direction. Do this for enterprise, for the rest of us make much larger, cheaper per TB drives. Nearly everyone doesn't need this fast a drive, what they do need is much more space on a fast reliable drive.
  • FunBunny2 - Saturday, March 25, 2023 - link

    "what they do need is much more space on a fast reliable drive."

    given that the 3.5" FF is still available, a bit I guess, I suspect one could get multiple TB on, say 30nm, NAND into such a FF. rugged MLC that lasts forever. wait... would using 30nm MLC NAND really piss off the foundries? ok, just kidding.
  • CoreLogicCom - Monday, March 27, 2023 - link

    Why are Adata's Project Nighthawk SSDs faster than Project Blackbird SSDs? Are they referencing actual birds or military aircraft names? If its the latter, they may want to consider reversing the project names because the Blackbird being slower is just silly. Maybe its the marketing guys thinking they can sell more slower SSDs if they name it something faster?

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