What are the actual consumer use cases for these kinds of speeds? I'm running high-end PCIe 4.0 drives for gaming, and they're still overkill as DirectStorage remains painfully absent in PC games.
I do benefit from NVME speeds in some games regardless (mainly ones that rely on high IOPS for asset loading), and I definitely utilize a couple GB/s for image processing, but I know most of these things would look pretty similar even at PCIe 3.0 speeds.
There aren't any. PCIe 5.0 NVMe storage reminds me of ATA\133. The interfaces (specifically, M.2 NGFF and IDE) are\were ancient and needed a modern replacement to keep pushing.
The reason to replace M2 is obviously different than IDE, but there are some similarities. It really comes down to M2's form factor being quite terrible for cooling. It solved the problem of SATA\U2 2.5" SSD's with packaging, but was not thought out well enough to be future-proof like SATA was. How could engineers a decade ago really know that NAND flash and controllers would become so incredibly hot that packaging it in 20x80 would present a throttling nightmare.
There is no good concept for a laptop replacement, but numerous companies have presented an M2 successor in the desktop and server space, notably Intel with the "ruler" SSD and the slowly adopted E1.L and E1.S, all of which are enterprise focused at the moment.
The M.2 standard was designed for laptops and mobile devices, and it is a great standard for that purpose. The problem was that it was carried over to the desktop where it was put on ATX motherboards in places like underneath the GPU where there is no airflow.
SATA Express was what was intended for desktop, and it failed (IMO) because it was a 2-lane standard so it was only slightly faster than SATA (1 GBps vs 600 MBps). U.2 really should have been the desktop standard, and I'm not sure why it never was widely adopted.
+1; they're making these because they can, and maybe because there are some enterprise use cases that will use all the bandwidth and IOPS you can possibly come up with.
With luck it leads to price drops for high-end PCIe4 SSDs, or, as another way of looking at it, increases the performance expected of midrange SSDs. Of course it's still extra perf you don't necessarily need, but that's not so bad if you aren't paying a lot for it.
I agree that there aren't any. The payoff will come much later when these drives become commonplace commodities and the price drops while the engineering gets better--so that heat sinks won't be a necessity.
How about looking really awesome inside of your case? Seriously, the GB one is so cool it's on fire... not because of it's need for thermal dissipation.
PCIe 4.0 is overkill for many users, but now priced reasonably and doesn't need active cooling. PCIe 5.0 SSDs will reach that point eventually. I assume new M.2 SSDs using the 2580/25110 sizes will all be PCIe 5.0, and they could see capacity bumps or other small improvements with the extra area.
Console SSDs were overhyped and extra RAM could bridge any gap that exists between a PC and PS5. We'll have to see if any storage faster than PCIe 4.0 matters throughout the 2020s.
The only one I could think of was acting as a crutch for very poorly optimized games that seem to have serious loading time issues, even on high end PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.
Yeah but a single PCIE 4.0 drive with ram cache already surpasses these 5.0 drives with 12Gbps R/W And 1.5m iops With out needing ac and for way cheaper.
For use cases ... Sure this is leading edge, ahead of the curve, tech for now.
However, high res photo & amateur video are becoming increasingly common even among consumers, not to mention the number of people generating video content of one form or another for social media or other small business uses (YouTube, drone video etc.), and will only get more common, and will continue to produce larger files.
Loading large files for editing does take time, perhaps more of an issue, several versions of files are often created for each event, location or client (different stages of proofing, color grading and other editing, with and without watermarks, logos, text or transitions, etc.), and manipulating and backing up large sets of files takes less time and will be done more often when transfer times are manageable. Sure, some of this can (eventually) be moved to slower media, but as there will still be a need for rapid access to large amounts of current or recent files for these types of users.
So while I agree that this tech isn't needed or justifiable for most mainstream users, I wouldn't go so far say that there are no use cases, or that those cases won't become more common - history suggests, probably more rapidly than we anticipate now. My $.02 fwiw, ymmv as always.
For generative AI, next version of Intel Chips, Meteor Lake, will have Adobe Machine Learning Built in for real time graphical manipulation in 2D and allowing Machine Learning to generate story boarding and movie clips, using that 2D model for very realistic output. This will be important moving forward for commercial advertising, animation, eventually 3D modeling. From the creators perspective, the more real time and powerful the workstation, the more fluid the workflow.
The real question shouldn't be if faster drives are coming, but if ones with reasonable thermal loads are coming. Neither the monster get in the way of everything heatsink, nor the 20mm screamer fan are reasonable options for general use.
I question how much that fan is really going to matter. Those things move like 1cu.ft/minute. A case with decent airflow and a strategically mounted M2 heatsink will cool these things.
Mine has fan connectors right next to the slots so someone can easily come up with a fan option. Currently it's not really a problem because 1) I don't push them that hard and 2) my case puts the cooling fans right next to them.
Considering the speeds of these Gen 5 SSDs, they most likely do need a heatsink to keep them from overheating under sustained loads. High end Gen 4 SSDs needed heatsinks, but the mid to lower end ones did not. Gen 1, 2, and 3 SSDs didn't need heatsinks at all.
The common factor here is speed. Fast SSDs will need a heatsink to keep both controller and NAND from overheating, where as slower ones just don't have the throughput to get hot to begin with.
What I'd like to see is a reduction of the PCIe lanes. For most consumers 1x or 2x PCIe 5 lanes would be plenty and would save lanes for additional devices.
Yeah the spec is useless. random performance / IOPS is far more interesting than this like much more common use case of copying a folder with tons of small files. Even better nvme drives are rather slow in this test and that sequential 10gb/s speed is irrelevant if they can't do even 250mb/s of such copy&paste
Best Buy is predicting this is going to be the worst year for consumer electronics in the company's history. I look forward to bargin bin SSDs on gen 5 by December.
This should be nice for video editing as well as saving and moving huge files between PCIe 5.0 internal drives quickly. My motherboard only has one 5.0 slot but four 4.0 slots so I think I'd really only see the benefit when editing video and/or large audio projects.
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Dizoja86 - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
What are the actual consumer use cases for these kinds of speeds? I'm running high-end PCIe 4.0 drives for gaming, and they're still overkill as DirectStorage remains painfully absent in PC games.I do benefit from NVME speeds in some games regardless (mainly ones that rely on high IOPS for asset loading), and I definitely utilize a couple GB/s for image processing, but I know most of these things would look pretty similar even at PCIe 3.0 speeds.
Samus - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
There aren't any. PCIe 5.0 NVMe storage reminds me of ATA\133. The interfaces (specifically, M.2 NGFF and IDE) are\were ancient and needed a modern replacement to keep pushing.The reason to replace M2 is obviously different than IDE, but there are some similarities. It really comes down to M2's form factor being quite terrible for cooling. It solved the problem of SATA\U2 2.5" SSD's with packaging, but was not thought out well enough to be future-proof like SATA was. How could engineers a decade ago really know that NAND flash and controllers would become so incredibly hot that packaging it in 20x80 would present a throttling nightmare.
There is no good concept for a laptop replacement, but numerous companies have presented an M2 successor in the desktop and server space, notably Intel with the "ruler" SSD and the slowly adopted E1.L and E1.S, all of which are enterprise focused at the moment.
The Von Matrices - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
The M.2 standard was designed for laptops and mobile devices, and it is a great standard for that purpose. The problem was that it was carried over to the desktop where it was put on ATX motherboards in places like underneath the GPU where there is no airflow.SATA Express was what was intended for desktop, and it failed (IMO) because it was a 2-lane standard so it was only slightly faster than SATA (1 GBps vs 600 MBps). U.2 really should have been the desktop standard, and I'm not sure why it never was widely adopted.
twotwotwo - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
+1; they're making these because they can, and maybe because there are some enterprise use cases that will use all the bandwidth and IOPS you can possibly come up with.With luck it leads to price drops for high-end PCIe4 SSDs, or, as another way of looking at it, increases the performance expected of midrange SSDs. Of course it's still extra perf you don't necessarily need, but that's not so bad if you aren't paying a lot for it.
WaltC - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
I agree that there aren't any. The payoff will come much later when these drives become commonplace commodities and the price drops while the engineering gets better--so that heat sinks won't be a necessity.ballsystemlord - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
How about looking really awesome inside of your case?Seriously, the GB one is so cool it's on fire... not because of it's need for thermal dissipation.
nandnandnand - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
PCIe 4.0 is overkill for many users, but now priced reasonably and doesn't need active cooling. PCIe 5.0 SSDs will reach that point eventually. I assume new M.2 SSDs using the 2580/25110 sizes will all be PCIe 5.0, and they could see capacity bumps or other small improvements with the extra area.Console SSDs were overhyped and extra RAM could bridge any gap that exists between a PC and PS5. We'll have to see if any storage faster than PCIe 4.0 matters throughout the 2020s.
meacupla - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
The only one I could think of was acting as a crutch for very poorly optimized games that seem to have serious loading time issues, even on high end PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.Euphorical - Saturday, March 4, 2023 - link
Yeah but a single PCIE 4.0 drive with ram cache already surpasses these 5.0 drives with 12Gbps R/WAnd 1.5m iops
With out needing ac and for way cheaper.
FL Guy - Saturday, March 4, 2023 - link
For use cases ... Sure this is leading edge, ahead of the curve, tech for now.However, high res photo & amateur video are becoming increasingly common even among consumers, not to mention the number of people generating video content of one form or another for social media or other small business uses (YouTube, drone video etc.), and will only get more common, and will continue to produce larger files.
Loading large files for editing does take time, perhaps more of an issue, several versions of files are often created for each event, location or client (different stages of proofing, color grading and other editing, with and without watermarks, logos, text or transitions, etc.), and manipulating and backing up large sets of files takes less time and will be done more often when transfer times are manageable. Sure, some of this can (eventually) be moved to slower media, but as there will still be a need for rapid access to large amounts of current or recent files for these types of users.
So while I agree that this tech isn't needed or justifiable for most mainstream users, I wouldn't go so far say that there are no use cases, or that those cases won't become more common - history suggests, probably more rapidly than we anticipate now. My $.02 fwiw, ymmv as always.
nandnandnand - Saturday, March 4, 2023 - link
Gen5 SSDs will be fast... until the cache fills up and write speeds crater.Euphorical - Saturday, March 4, 2023 - link
Better to pay the same cost for more ram and use cache and enjoy the added benefits of having more ram, over jumping ship to early next gen SSDsgarygech - Sunday, May 28, 2023 - link
For generative AI, next version of Intel Chips, Meteor Lake, will have Adobe Machine Learning Built in for real time graphical manipulation in 2D and allowing Machine Learning to generate story boarding and movie clips, using that 2D model for very realistic output. This will be important moving forward for commercial advertising, animation, eventually 3D modeling. From the creators perspective, the more real time and powerful the workstation, the more fluid the workflow.back2future - Sunday, March 5, 2023 - link
getting into DDR3/DDR4 class memory enhancement (1TB memory $~2k-4k)powerarmour - Sunday, March 5, 2023 - link
Those stupidly sized heatsinks (and fans) will put a lot of people off. That increase in speed just doesn't seem worth that kind of trade off.DanNeely - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
The real question shouldn't be if faster drives are coming, but if ones with reasonable thermal loads are coming. Neither the monster get in the way of everything heatsink, nor the 20mm screamer fan are reasonable options for general use.Samus - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
I question how much that fan is really going to matter. Those things move like 1cu.ft/minute. A case with decent airflow and a strategically mounted M2 heatsink will cool these things.Threska - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
Mine has fan connectors right next to the slots so someone can easily come up with a fan option. Currently it's not really a problem because 1) I don't push them that hard and 2) my case puts the cooling fans right next to them.FunBunny2 - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
the odd part of this all: there was a time, not all that long ago, when Phison kit was lower than dirt. the Rocky Balboa of SSD.meacupla - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
Phison sells many different grades of SSD controller chips.https://www.phison.com/en/solutions/consumer/pc-la...
E26 is really expensive, but SSDs equipped with E19T or E13T are significantly cheaper
Techie2 - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
I doubt most of the Gen 5 SSDs need the stupidly huge heatsinks. Until the prices come down only the foolish will buy them.meacupla - Friday, March 3, 2023 - link
Considering the speeds of these Gen 5 SSDs, they most likely do need a heatsink to keep them from overheating under sustained loads.High end Gen 4 SSDs needed heatsinks, but the mid to lower end ones did not.
Gen 1, 2, and 3 SSDs didn't need heatsinks at all.
The common factor here is speed. Fast SSDs will need a heatsink to keep both controller and NAND from overheating, where as slower ones just don't have the throughput to get hot to begin with.
ERJ - Saturday, March 4, 2023 - link
What I'd like to see is a reduction of the PCIe lanes. For most consumers 1x or 2x PCIe 5 lanes would be plenty and would save lanes for additional devices.Dante Verizon - Saturday, March 4, 2023 - link
In what scenario is this speed relevant for an ordinary consumer?Euphorical - Saturday, March 4, 2023 - link
It's not these are for pro-sumers, where time = money.keyserr - Sunday, March 5, 2023 - link
When it comes to game load times there's usually a bottleneck elsewhere as all the nvme drives seem to be about the same speed.beginner99 - Sunday, March 5, 2023 - link
Yeah the spec is useless. random performance / IOPS is far more interesting than this like much more common use case of copying a folder with tons of small files. Even better nvme drives are rather slow in this test and that sequential 10gb/s speed is irrelevant if they can't do even 250mb/s of such copy&pasteit's sad 3dxpoint is dead.
PeachNCream - Tuesday, March 7, 2023 - link
Best Buy is predicting this is going to be the worst year for consumer electronics in the company's history. I look forward to bargin bin SSDs on gen 5 by December.alvester - Sunday, April 9, 2023 - link
This should be nice for video editing as well as saving and moving huge files between PCIe 5.0 internal drives quickly. My motherboard only has one 5.0 slot but four 4.0 slots so I think I'd really only see the benefit when editing video and/or large audio projects.