First Consumer PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD Gets Tested, Makes a Lot of Noise

[erek]

I guess that fan noise is sub-optimal

"Before we go into the performance figures, there's one thing that needs to be highlighted about this drive, it produces a high pitch noise during use, thanks to its tiny 17x17 mm, 21,000 rpm fan from Sunon. @momomo_us provided a video on Twitter which is linked below, so you can hear it in action for yourself. Hopefully this isn't the future of NVMe SSDs, as it's going to put off many potential customers from getting one. @momomo_us only tested the drive with CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4, which shows that sequential write speeds are slightly faster than claimed by CFD Gaming, with the sequential write speeds being bang on the money. For those hoping for higher random performance, things aren't looking so great, as the drive only performs slightly better than the best PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives."

https://www.techpowerup.com/304463/first-consumer-pcie-5-0-nvme-ssd-gets-tested-makes-a-lot-of-noise

 

[Zepher]

The Corsair one also has a fan on it,

 

[Mega6]

Still early on with these pcie 5 nvme drives, not getting one with an annoying fan. Plus the performance gap isn't large enough from v4.

 

[Sycraft]

Ya... Even if I had a PCIe 5 drive slot that would be a hard pass from me with a noisy little fan. I'll wait until the tech develops to the point they don't need one, which I'm sure it will as nodes keep shrinking. 7GB/sec is plenty fast enough for me, and doesn't need a fan to achieve.

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

I really don't miss the various noises made by HDDs. SSDs creating any kind of sound is a regression.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Ugh.

This means a need for more and more water blocks. Ram blocks, SSD blocks etc. etc. It's really going to choke flow.

 

[Lakados]

While I am sure the benchmark tests show this drive is awesome, tests I have seen showing gaming performance differences from PCIe3, 4, and 5 are minimal with less than a second between the lot with any of the various direct storage tech. I’ll wait for the next gen memory modules that run cooler and won’t require active cooling.

 

[erek]

While I am sure the benchmark tests show this drive is awesome, tests I have seen showing gaming performance differences from PCIe3, 4, and 5 are minimal with less than a second between the lot with any of the various direct storage tech. I’ll wait for the next gen memory modules that run cooler and won’t require active cooling.

What about this? Even less reasons to go Gen5

https://wccftech.com/microsoft-dire...er-pcie-gen-3-ssds-as-fast-as-new-gen-5-ssds/

 

[Sycraft]

While I am sure the benchmark tests show this drive is awesome, tests I have seen showing gaming performance differences from PCIe3, 4, and 5 are minimal with less than a second between the lot with any of the various direct storage tech. I’ll wait for the next gen memory modules that run cooler and won’t require active cooling.

There's also just practical limits in gaming as to how fast you need to stream in assets. I mean even assuming you are using DirectStorage and everything is well coded and stored nice and sequential so you can make use of all the speed, you reach a limit as to how much data you need to load in a given amount of time. So long as you can get all the data needed in to RAM in time, it doesn't really matter if it is any faster. It is kinda like RAM itself: Once you have enough more doesn't matter because you already have enough for it to store everything it wants to.

Now in theory game assets could just keep getting bigger and bigger, but there's real limits on that just in the cost/time of development. While it might be a nice thought that every rock, every leaf, would be hand crafted by an artist and all unique, that isn't at all realistic. They have to re-use assets and do procedural generation just to keep the time and cost to make a game somewhat reasonable.

We'll see where it goes but I suspect that even gen 3 drives are likely to be more than plenty for streaming in game assets. As for more traditional loading, as you noted it makes little difference as we already have other limitations.

 

[Lakados]

What about this? Even less reasons to go Gen5

https://wccftech.com/microsoft-dire...er-pcie-gen-3-ssds-as-fast-as-new-gen-5-ssds/

Decompression speeds are essentially the limiting factor here and GDeflate works pretty much the same across both AMD and NVidia. And any hardware that can handle DirectStorage will not be limited by the storage speeds in any meaningful way it’s going to be the times it takes for the GPU to register the data and map it.

A better test would be how different GPUs affect the load times. Like a 3060 vs a 4070ti vs a 4090. Similarity the 6600xt, 6800xt, and 7900xtx, that would be more interesting for me personally.

 

[Thunderdolt]

56% of systems in the Steam Survey have 6GB or less VRAM. 37% have 4GB or less. Over 82% have 16GB or less system memory.

It's going to be a long time before game developers make assets so big that faster SSDs become useful for their games.

Sure, developers could move towards streaming more assets rather than preloading, but it's going to be a long time before that happens as well given that 80+% of systems on Steam couldn't handle that. Five years from now, that number is still going to be above 70%.


Going back to the OP, this doesn't really surprise me. Even with just Gen4, SSD performance is primarily limited by the controller and not the PCI bandwidth. Heck, even Gen3 x4 is theoretically capable of 16,384MB/s in each direction. We've had flash on drives that can exceed this for a while. The controllers are what's holding back performance.

 

[Mega6]

 

[DanNeely]

56% of systems in the Steam Survey have 6GB or less VRAM. 37% have 4GB or less. Over 82% have 16GB or less system memory.

It's going to be a long time before game developers make assets so big that faster SSDs become useful for their games.

Sure, developers could move towards streaming more assets rather than preloading, but it's going to be a long time before that happens as well given that 80+% of systems on Steam couldn't handle that. Five years from now, that number is still going to be above 70%.


Going back to the OP, this doesn't really surprise me. Even with just Gen4, SSD performance is primarily limited by the controller and not the PCI bandwidth. Heck, even Gen3 x4 is theoretically capable of 16,384MB/s in each direction. We've had flash on drives that can exceed this for a while. The controllers are what's holding back performance.

less than 10% of gamers on steam have a 3080 or better (closer to 5 I think but I didn't want to track down all the less common models and add them up); but devs offer halo quality settings that only people with top of the line cards can enjoy. If they can do something to make the game prettier (or just flashier) with extra storage bandwidth some of them will.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Their shake machine was broke.

While I am sure the benchmark tests show this drive is awesome, tests I have seen showing gaming performance differences from PCIe3, 4, and 5 are minimal with less than a second between the lot with any of the various direct storage tech. I’ll wait for the next gen memory modules that run cooler and won’t require active cooling.

That, and newer generation PCIe interfaces enable faster sequential speeds, but that's not where the biggest benefit lies in SSD's.

The fastest load times and best responsiveness will usually come from high IOPS and/or high low queue depth random 4k reads, NOT from sequential speeds

The QD=1 RND4K are really the numbers to look at for what makes the biggest difference, and they are usually well under 100MB/s, and for that you don't need Gen5. You don't even need Gen4.

Often these results scale higher on drives that also have higher sequential speeds, but not always.

That result on the bottom left is the one to pay attention too. Ignore everything above that line:

I recently ran the tests on all the spare drives in my spare parts bin and what is currently in my system.


First by high queue depth sequential speeds:

Drive​	Type​	Seq (Q8T1)​	Seq (Q1T1)​	Rnd 4k (Q32T1)​	Rnd 4K (Q1T1)​
Samsung 980 Pro 2TB​	NVMe 4x Gen4 TLC​	6881.03​	4077.2​	511.21​	83.16​
Sabrent Rocket 4.0 2TB​	NVMe 4x Gen4 TLC​	4795.94​	2141.76​	647.71​	42.66​
Samsung 970 EVO 1TB​	NVMe 4x Gen3 MLC​	3289.19​	2565.27​	538.67​	48.81​
Intel SSD750 400GB​	NVMe 4x Gen3 MLC​	2248.19​	1123​	283.19​	31.86​
Samsung 850 Pro 512GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	569.42​	518.23​	334.06​	26.15​
Samsung 870 EVO 250GB​	6Gb/s SATA TLC​	569.08​	500.43​	329.72​	31.65​
Samsung OEM CM817a 256GB​	6Gb/s SATA TLC?​	561.77​	496.19​	273.77​	26.08​
Samsung 840 Pro 128GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	554.85​	521.01​	299.93​	25.71​
Samsung 850 Pro 128GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	554.12​	502.77​	342.18​	26.87​
Samsung 840 EVO 120GB​	6Gb/s SATA TLC​	553.94​	488.64​	286.13​	25.32​
Sandisk 64GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	545.47​	484.22​	38.95​	16.43​
OCZ Vector 256GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	531​	453.33​	318.75​	23.24​
Samsung OEM PM830 128GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC?​	518.68​	417.34​	245.12​	19.31​
Intel S3700 100GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	499.52​	451.67​	305.99​	26.21​
ADATA SP600 32GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	409.18​	368.04​	135.91​	27.66​
Intel 320 160GB​	3Gb/s SATA MLC​	284.55​	261.14​	160.16​	17.67​
WD Blue 1TB WD10EZEX​	6Gb/s SATA 7200rpm​	192.38​	192.25​	2.35​	0.71​
WD Green 3TB WD30EZRX​	6Gb/s SATA 5400rpm​	132.13​	130.04​	1.87​	0.57​
WD Blue 250GB WD2500AAJS​	3Gb/s SATA 7200rpm​	94​	95​	1.67​	0.64​

And second by low queue depth random 4k reads:

Drive​	Type​	Seq (Q8T1)​	Seq (Q1T1)​	Rnd 4k (Q32T1)​	Rnd 4K (Q1T1)​
Samsung 980 Pro 2TB​	NVMe 4x Gen4 TLC​	6881.03​	4077.2​	511.21​	83.16​
Samsung 970 EVO 1TB​	NVMe 4x Gen3 MLC​	3289.19​	2565.27​	538.67​	48.81​
Sabrent Rocket 4.0 2TB​	NVMe 4x Gen4 TLC​	4795.94​	2141.76​	647.71​	42.66​
Intel SSD750 400GB​	NVMe 4x Gen3 MLC​	2248.19​	1123​	283.19​	31.86​
Samsung 870 EVO 250GB​	6Gb/s SATA TLC​	569.08​	500.43​	329.72​	31.65​
ADATA SP600 32GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	409.18​	368.04​	135.91​	27.66​
Samsung 850 Pro 128GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	554.12​	502.77​	342.18​	26.87​
Intel S3700 100GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	499.52​	451.67​	305.99​	26.21​
Samsung 850 Pro 512GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	569.42​	518.23​	334.06​	26.15​
Samsung OEM CM817a 256GB​	6Gb/s SATA TLC?​	561.77​	496.19​	273.77​	26.08​
Samsung 840 Pro 128GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	554.85​	521.01​	299.93​	25.71​
Samsung 840 EVO 120GB​	6Gb/s SATA TLC​	553.94​	488.64​	286.13​	25.32​
OCZ Vector 256GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	531​	453.33​	318.75​	23.24​
Samsung OEM PM830 128GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC?​	518.68​	417.34​	245.12​	19.31​
Intel 320 160GB​	3Gb/s SATA MLC​	284.55​	261.14​	160.16​	17.67​
Sandisk 64GB​	6Gb/s SATA MLC​	545.47​	484.22​	38.95​	16.43​
WD Blue 1TB WD10EZEX​	6Gb/s SATA 7200rpm​	192.38​	192.25​	2.35​	0.71​
WD Blue 250GB WD2500AAJS​	3Gb/s SATA 7200rpm​	94​	95​	1.67​	0.64​
WD Green 3TB WD30EZRX​	6Gb/s SATA 5400rpm​	132.13​	130.04​	1.87​	0.57​

Surprisingly strong showing from the little 32GB Adata drive


The last table, the one sorted by RND4K is the one I'd make my decisions on.

And it holds up. My Gen4 Sabrent Rocket 4.0 has higher sequential speeds, but my old Gen3 Samsung 970 EVO loads games and programs faster, and guess what, the 970 Evo has higher RND4K speeds...

I just ignore the top line sequential numbers on all of my drive purchases now. RND4K is where it is at.

 

[SPARTAN VI]

Good thing I'm a normie who can't tell the difference between my SATA SSDs and my NVMe SSDs when loading similar games.

 

[Mega6]

Good thing I'm a normie who can't tell the difference between my SATA SSDs and my NVMe SSDs when loading similar games.

Well that's the thing, sata ssd vs nvme is a couple seconds difference at best. Direct storage is going to change that.

 

[erek]

Gigabyte Gen5

https://www.techpowerup.com/304475/gigabyte-formally-launches-aorus-gen5-10000-series-nvme-ssds

 

[westrock2000]

10GB/s, do you really even need that much RAM at that point? In 10 years, you think system ram will matter much anymore? Maybe just put several GB of L3 on CPU’s.

 

[Sycraft]

10GB/s, do you really even need that much RAM at that point? In 10 years, you think system ram will matter much anymore? Maybe just put several GB of L3 on CPU’s.

I mean that's still a lot slower than RAM. Modern high end system you are talking something more like 80GB/sec or more and even older systems you are probably talking 30GB/sec or more. That aside, latency and random access are the real killers. SSDs are fast, on the order of 10s of microseconds but RAM is WAY faster, on the order of 10s of nanoseconds. That's about 1000 times lower latency. So speed, maybe SSDs are getting near what you'd need, at least for lower end things but latency? Not a chance. Still way too high. There's also the endurance issue. Systems often thrash RAM pretty hard, modifying things many times a second. That's fine for RAM, but for flash that uses up your write lifetime. The reason flash works so well for disks is most workloads DON'T thrash it much, writes are just not that heavy.

Believe me, once technology gets to the point that you can have permanent storage fast enough to use in place of RAM, you'll see systems go that way. There are tons of advantages and you already see things like NVDIMMS for certain critical servers when the DIMM itself has flash on board to write the data to in the event of power failure. But the tech is just not there yet, and is still a long way away.

 

[funkydmunky]

NVME the new GPU! Can't wait for the triple fan Titan editions

 

[RanceJustice]

Now that we've had 2 generations or so with PCI-E 5.0 capability, it makes sense that the SSDs start showing up to take advantage of that. I'll be waiting to see what Samsung will come up with and hope it doesn't have any critical failures (or at least, those that cannot be resolved by a firmware update) or cut corners especially if they're going to call it a PRO drive. I was kind of surprised that the 990 PRO was not a 5.0 drive but at least if they're taking the time hopefully they'll make it right and won't cut corners.

Seeing the fans or heatsinks is curious and I'm wondering if it really is a major thermal issue or rather a design issue one way or another (ie with better design, it wouldn't be necessary to have a loud fan on the damn thing). I'm guessing in time the heatsinks and fans will slim down until we get something closer to the "heatsink variant" for PCi-E 4.0 drives sometimes offered (ie Samsung 980 and 990 Pros had versions with and without heatsinks). Ultimately, it will depend on the motherboard it seems (by the way, it was interesting to know that AMD PCi-E 5.0 capable chipsets, even B650, can offer the slot without taking up any PEG bandwidth but apparently Intel despite it being their 2nd chipset with PCI-E 5.0 capability, does not?) as far as space and cooling. I know that lots of higher end mobos for X670E are offering "hidden" slots for M.2 drives that connect them to heatsinks when installed, for instance. In addition I know that Asus ROG have a couple of boards where there is a RAM-like DIMM-style mounting card that can handle 2 M.2 SSDs (on at 5.0 and one 4.0) which can likely handle whatever sort of thick heatsink like the Gigabyte provides, if needed. There are also boards that include a traditional PCI-E slot adapter card that can take one or more M.2 drives and offers a significant heatsink for a single-slot card.

Hopefully they manufacturers will do a good job with these 5.0 drives, but I'll be keeping my eyes open to see if the increasingly limited list of high end SSD manufacturers can attempt to sustain quality.

 

[M76]

Well that's the thing, sata ssd vs nvme is a couple seconds difference at best. Direct storage is going to change that.

For the worse it seems

Good thing I'm a normie who can't tell the difference between my SATA SSDs and my NVMe SSDs when loading similar games.

That's because there isn't much difference.

Everyone is burning with NVME gen 4 and gen 5 fever, when in practice it makes so little difference. 5GB/S and 10GB/s looks good on paper, except you never need to transfer even 1GB sequentially ever in normal use.

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

10GB/s, do you really even need that much RAM at that point? In 10 years, you think system ram will matter much anymore? Maybe just put several GB of L3 on CPU’s.

The throughput of DDR5 on a dual-channel memory controller (e.g., every current mainstream desktop/laptop) is ~6-10x as fast as PCIe 5 SSDs (e.g., DDR5-5600 is ~89.6 GB/s (per the Intel datasheet for the i7-13700k), PCIe 5 x4 is ~15.7 GB/s (and no SSD gets even close to that currently)). Step up to the 4/8/12 channel controllers in workstation and server CPUs to further trounce PCIe data transfer rates. Also, the latency of RAM is measured in nanoseconds, compared to microseconds for NAND-based NVMe SSDs (i.e., RAM is 1000x quicker). DDR RAM is advancing roughly on-par with PCIe (new versions that roughly double performance every few years).

As for increasing L3 cache, that would be a challenge. Even with AMD's 3D stacking each chiplet only has 96 MB of L3. To get that to just 1 GB would be a 10.7x increase. The CPU would be huge and expensive as hell.

SSDs are and will be in no position to displace RAM even in part. There would have to be a massive rethink in how PCs are designed and the protocols used for interconnects, as well as significant advances in/a replacement for NAND for that to happen. There was hope with Optane and using it on DIMMs, but that of course Intel and Micron couldn't make Optane profitable so the tech died.

 

[Comixbooks]

There is probably no way to get the heat down so it's not even worth it unless your overclocking SSDs

 

[cjcox]

Ya... Even if I had a PCIe 5 drive slot that would be a hard pass from me with a noisy little fan. I'll wait until the tech develops to the point they don't need one, which I'm sure it will as nodes keep shrinking. 7GB/sec is plenty fast enough for me, and doesn't need a fan to achieve.

It's coming, along with the fanless 4090.

 

[SJetski71]

There is probably no way to get the heat down so it's not even worth it unless your overclocking SSDs

 

[Comixbooks]

View attachment 547073

That a watercooling fitting?

 

[DanNeely]

That a watercooling fitting?

Oldschool chipset block?

 

[SJetski71]

Oldschool chipset block?

I think the random image i snagged said peltier btw.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

View attachment 547073

Oldschool chipset block?

This is probably going to wind up being the way to do it, which sucks, because we used to only need two blocks, CPU and GPU. Some people added chipset/vrm blocks but they were mostly unnecessary.

But now DDR5 is apparently super hot, and so are Gen5 m.2 drives. This means more and more blocks that are going to rob us of flow, and ass complexity to our loops...

Maybe they don't require the same microchannel structure as a CPU or GPU blivn would, which minimizes the impact to flow, but still...

 

[That_Sound_Guy]

Time to run 2 water loops! Will need to buy a $10k desk with a steel I beam to hold the weight along with your 220 outlet.

A shame LAN's are dead. Would be highly entertaining to see the calamity now of these behemoth systems being fork lifted in.

 

[sfsuphysics]

So is the heat from the high speed data transmission? They can no longer be passively cooled with case fans giving a little cooler air?

I'll stick with what I got then

 

[Lakados]

How long until we just have M.2 slots on the underside of our GPUs and Nvidia and AMD just develop some platform that scans down our installed games and unpacks the assets directly there, so that way when running a title you have already prepared all the assets it needs are already on the card and it can just pull it from there instead?

 

[Thunderdolt]

How long until we just have M.2 slots on the underside of our GPUs and Nvidia and AMD just develop some platform that scans down our installed games and unpacks the assets directly there, so that way when running a title you have already prepared all the assets it needs are already on the card and it can just pull it from there instead?

They would still hit the same bottleneck since those assets would need to be loaded into VRAM before use anyway. That means hitting the same slow SSD that wasn't limited by the bus to begin with.

 

[AXm77]

AMD already made card like that : Radeon Pro SSG.

 

[trikat]

Still sticking with Gen3. Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite won't fit Gen5 + the cost!
Only two NVME slots and both blocked by the GPU. The one closest to the CPU always runs hot even with the Gigabyte thermal guard.

 

[Wade88]

Ugh.

This means a need for more and more water blocks. Ram blocks, SSD blocks etc. etc. It's really going to choke flow.

Disparate loops are s thing.

 

[vegeta535]

This is probably going to wind up being the way to do it, which sucks, because we used to only need two blocks, CPU and GPU. Some people added chipset/vrm blocks but they were mostly unnecessary.

But now DDR5 is apparently super hot, and so are Gen5 m.2 drives. This means more and more blocks that are going to rob us of flow, and ass complexity to our loops...

Maybe they don't require the same microchannel structure as a CPU or GPU blivn would, which minimizes the impact to flow, but still...

You don't need to go over the top and WC everything geez.

 

[Tsumi]

This is probably going to wind up being the way to do it, which sucks, because we used to only need two blocks, CPU and GPU. Some people added chipset/vrm blocks but they were mostly unnecessary.

But now DDR5 is apparently super hot, and so are Gen5 m.2 drives. This means more and more blocks that are going to rob us of flow, and ass complexity to our loops...

Maybe they don't require the same microchannel structure as a CPU or GPU blivn would, which minimizes the impact to flow, but still...

Put the blocks in parallel. I doubt an M.2 SSD needs the full flow potential of the system to stay cool.

 

[cpufrost]

Put it on a PCB like Intel Enterprise SSDs and be done with it. No one is going to use this in a laptop.
Looks like it's optimized for STR vs. random too which is too bad. We really need a current gen that can compete with (now deprecated) X Point drives!
But if you really want it on the mainboard and plan on liquid cooling everything then a custom full cover (monoblock) is the only way to go! (think of waterjacket like intake manifold on a car that bolts on and cools chipset, VRM, CPU, et al)