Kazekage1981
Member
Perhaps the announcement today will give more info on DirectStorageAPI?!
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Seagate PCIe4 next-gen storage event on 23rd June
- Thread starter cormack12
- Start date
Kazekage1981
Member
Kazekage1981
Member
From my take:
-SSD speed up to 7.3 GB/sec (theoretical max)
-Endurance: How much you can read and write at same time: 5100 total Terabytes (700gigabytes write per day) or 70% of drives capacity every day for 5 years. Great for content creators especially dealing with 4k movies (!?). The FireCuda prevents you worrying about when the SSD is going to fail you and extends the lifespan of the NVMe SSD drive
-Cooling: Speed and Endurance can create a lot of heat, so their is liquid cooling with heat sink SSD from EK
Didnt mention anything about DirectStorageAPI. Emphasis on PCIE Gen 4.
I'm not too tech savy, but this sounds good so far..
IntentionalPun
Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
Basically just top of the line PCIE 4 drive maybe pushing the limits of the spec a bit further than others.
CamHostage
Member
Thank you for the breakdown. Even scrubbing through the video, I could only take so many product ID numbers before I zoned out...
From what I saw, the whole video was just the FireCuda 530; it was an hour-long into of the one next-gen SSD device, which is a really rad SSD by the specs but as far as I could tell that was the only major gear announced, there was not a variety of FireCuda lines or any new BarraCuda cheaper solutions. And then some general talk about partner motherboards and other hardware I'm not into (I'm primarily a console gamer and then a laptop user, so my thirstiness for bleeding-edge PC tech is very liteweight, be excited if you are a heavyweight,) plus some filler chats with Deadmaus and CD Projekt Red.
Nothing on PS5 SSD expansion (meh, but they never promised that news,) nothing on DirectStorage oddly, and I didn't see anything in the middle section (after the 530 product debut) that really hinted at things to come beyond the product being showcased.
Still, the FireCuda 530 sounds enviable. The endurance aspect is really compelling to me, having a SSD that "promises" 5 years of constant rewriting before cells fail is great for gaming and a video business drive. (There's always a question of what to do about long-term storage, you still need an offline solution, but you need that anyway if you're moving files in and out constantly, although I do wish they had introduced an endurance-focused cold-storage solution as well as this ultrafast SSD tech as it unnerves me every time I put my personal content on a spinning platter, and I've also had memory units fail so those don't feel safe to me either.) Building it for simultaneous work bandwidth on the SSD is a good thing as well. And then, just the increasing speed thresholds of SSDs is always a fun space race to be around for.
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DarkMage619
$MSFT
Will this be the drive to use in the PS5 to expand its internal storage?
Kazekage1981
Member
They didn't mention it in their presentation, so I am not sure.
HTK
Banned
You know what, that's not too bad. Not bad at all.
S0ULZB0URNE
Member
Kazekage1981
Member
I didnt realize there is a lot of 'wear and tear' when using NVMe SSD's. What is the average lifespan of NVMe SSD's? Has there been additional technological innovations to extend the lifespan?
It's not just nvme drives, all nand has durability loss and lifespan normally measured in data written. It's actually been getting worse, as they have been making different types of nand to bring down the costs the trade off has been durability/lifespan. That said it shouldn't be much of an issue for the general user (us).
VAVA Mk2
Member
"It's Ridge Racer! Ridgeeee Racerrrr!"What a legend, full swagger.
supernova8
Banned
A massive line of PCs all being turned on simultaneously, and then a guy from Guinness World Records with a blue blazer, a clipboard, and a stopwatch. A few seconds later, he says, in a dry and uninterested tone, "Well.. that's a new world record".
CamHostage
Member
It's not wear-and-tear, per se? More like limited punches on the timecard before the paper is all full of holes and you need a new one?
As I understand it, the cells themselves have a limited number of times you can erase and write to them. So every time you change a 1 to a 0 on the many, many, many cells in a SSD, that's one tick on its punchcard towards the point where it eventually will burn out that cell. It's rated for X thousand uses, and even when you're moving multiple GBs onto a TB drive, you're only flipping so many kabillion bits on and off with that file transfer across the blahzillion-bit stretch of the drive. So in the case of this FireCuda 530, you can rewrite across 70% of the entire drive 360 days a year for 5 years and still not expect all those cells to fail; come year 6 though, they'll all be ready for retirement, and although many will still be working, you'll be putting mileage on that might leave you stranded. (The drive will smartly move data to good cells and/or verify when it's writing to a dead cell, and I think fragmentation is supposed to be less a problem than an HDD, but even those benefits aren't enough to avoid consequences.)
For most users in business, rewriting hundreds of GBs a day is unusual; we use the hard drive for storage of things we want to keep, not for filling up and emptying the fridge every day. And reads are not wear-and-tear on a SSD in the same way. It can go in and read what's on your drive all day long and that's not counted against its X thousand uses limit. If all you were doing was reading your old photos and playing the same movie over and over or just playing Fortnite all day every day and never getting a new game again, the SSD would stay in relatively good shape. Ratchet can cross worlds in the blink of an eye or the Medium (whatever her name is?) can watch a hospital suddenly turn into a fortress and it's all fine with essentially no wear on the drive for either because it's just pulling what's already written once into use.
(*You'd think that would make SSDs great for long-term storage, but it turns out, memory units kind of suck for that because they lose data when they haven't been plugged in, and they lose it faster if the cells have been used a few thousand times towards their X thousand use lifespan, and just the whole card could go dead instead of a HDD getting some scratches from dust or a platter sticking or something like that. It's a 1-bit level of fucked, either it works and you're 0 fucked or you are 100% fucked and nothing you can do about it.)
For gamers, though, the saving grace of reads not counting is not helping anymore, because we're using our SSDs to the max. Every time we turn off the system, we're now writing the entire RAM buffer to a QuickSave file on the SSD to come back to later. We're streaming our gameplay and caching some if not all of that before transferring it to the cloud. We're patching and repatching the games we already have on storage by the multi-gigabyte. We're really just popping shit in and out of there all day long, because SSDs are awesome, and we're not thinking right now about what happens when one turns from awesome to a disaster. But, for now, they're really handy to use as we're using them, and in the future when we do have to replace our onboard SSDs with a new one, the solutions should be there (what's up, Sony? MS, you're good) and the written data should mostly still be there to make use of. But we'll see how bad that gets when we get there...
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Dream-Knife
Banned
We already have M.2s that do 7gb/s though.
Wait, is this some new technology that utilizes multiple drives to achieve faster performance?
Self_Destructive
Member
lol.. RAID isn't some new technology lmao.
Any this is such bullshit. Everyone knows that Sequential Read isn't indicative of real-world loading performance.
Notice how they conveniently cover up the Random 4K results? The very bottom one... which remains the same 83MB/s....
lol
Dream-Knife
Banned
Does PS5 utilize standby differently? On a PC sleep mode saves the current state to RAM, not the SSD. Hibernate saves to your drive, but no one uses that anyway.
You did raise a good point; what kind of longevity are we getting with a console who's SSD is soldered to the motherboard?
I assume it wouldn't be too much of a problem for most people though.
Sarcasm my dude.
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CamHostage
Member
Well, I was thinking more of Xbox Series' sleep mode; PS5 has I believe what PS4 did (and your DS and PSP and now Switch) where it's still a semi-warm sleep mode and so it's drawing power constantly unless you shut it down (and it gets pissed because it fragments if you unplug it in a sleep session), and people want a "proper" instant-resume on PS5 but it also wakes up and loads games so fast that it's hard to complain about the time it takes to get going when a game is ready sometimes before your TV even comes out of its cold.
(*I don't have a next-gen console so I'm going off of second-hand knowledge of what either does and doesn't do.)
You mean a RAID? That's pretty normal for drives to be arraigned in combos in a RAID. I always thought of a RAID as just sort of a box that you build, for having a lot of data on one wire, I know there are benefits for it in especially server farms, but this is the first time I've actually not seen compelling numbers written out like that of having two or three drives working in tandem. I really didn't consider the value of a SSD in a RAID but it makes sense when you see them stacked up (because each chip can deliver individual read/write/seeks while the others are doing their thing, so I guess it really does compound so long as you have the bandwidth to bring the data in and it's redundantly stored?) I feel like there's some cheating in those numbers but if it's stored correctly I could see getting bonkers performance out of a SSD RAID if that was your goal.
(EDIT: Oh, sarcasm? Gotcha, but I think some people might still wonder, or just have the feeling I did and I think you did, when the numbers seem kind of grifted but still it makes some sense why they calculated them that way.)
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