Friday, September 9th 2022
Not All First Generation PCIe 5.0 SSDs Will Offer the Same Performance
The first batch of PCIe 5.0 SSDs are all likely to be based on Phison's PS5026-E26 controller, which offers eight NAND channels, capable of supporting NAND speeds of up to 2400 MT/s. Phison's own figures for the controller are 13 GB/s writes and 12 GB/s reads, with up to 1.5 million random read IOPS and 2 million random write IOPS. However, as we've already seen from various SSD brands, many PCIe 5.0 SSDs won't exceed 10 GB/s when it comes to the sequential read/write speeds. This is because the current NAND flash simply isn't fast enough to saturate the PCIe 5.0 bus, which is capable of 15.75 GB/s. That said, Micron's 232-layer 3D NAND should be able to boost the performance up to 12.4 GB/s based on the numbers Gigabyte announced for their Aorus Gen 10000 SSD.
Based on an article over at Tom's Hardware, we shouldn't expect too many drives that exceed 10 GB/s sequential writes at launch, due to most drives using 176-layer 3D NAND flash, that is limited to 1600 MT/s. As such, it might be wise to hold off on buying the first generation of PCIe 5.0 drives and wait for better availability of 232-layer 3D NAND, as beyond Micron, SK Hynix is expected to have a 238-layer 3D NAND flash in the market sometime in the first half of 2023. If you're not really eager to have the fastest SSD out there for pure bragging rights, it would seem that mid 2023 might be the right time to get a PCIe 5.0 SSD.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
Based on an article over at Tom's Hardware, we shouldn't expect too many drives that exceed 10 GB/s sequential writes at launch, due to most drives using 176-layer 3D NAND flash, that is limited to 1600 MT/s. As such, it might be wise to hold off on buying the first generation of PCIe 5.0 drives and wait for better availability of 232-layer 3D NAND, as beyond Micron, SK Hynix is expected to have a 238-layer 3D NAND flash in the market sometime in the first half of 2023. If you're not really eager to have the fastest SSD out there for pure bragging rights, it would seem that mid 2023 might be the right time to get a PCIe 5.0 SSD.
55 Comments on Not All First Generation PCIe 5.0 SSDs Will Offer the Same Performance
Maybe time for a motherboard redesign with M.2 slots on the back, plenty of space for a heatsink behind the motherboard tray.
So would my idea, where they'd hang off the front edge of the motherboard and use up that empty space in most cases, but then again, that would only work on standard ATX boards.
That heatsink wasn't too big and works really well to cool the drive, even when stress testing it.
The flat bits of aluminium that came with the board, not so much.
reads/writes are a problem for every current SSD (due to caching) and plagues them no matter the interface as does random read/write performance. We need something that rewrites the book for consumer NAND storage overall not just higher sequential burst numbers.I guess i am skipping PCIe 5.0 SSD in that case.
As such, it's a bad idea getting this first generation of drives, much like many early PCIe 4.0 drives.
Serious it's been like this even with HDD different performance levels.
Even shit-tier, DRAMless, QLC, budget SSDs can generally sustain decent read speeds. Maybe don't expect high IOPS and low latency but they can sequentially stream gigabytes a second for practically their entire capacity.
I believe it would be great if mainboard makers would revisit the concept because, yes, thermals are going to be an increasing problem with faster SSDs. The top PCIe 4.0 drives already get close to the thermal limits even when "only" gaming if they are installed in the top slot under a RTX 3090.
The 25mm width might help a little, but in the long run, I figure we will need a redesign with riser cards or a switch to PCIe cards with active cooling and more than 16 PCIe slot lanes on the boards so that a SSD card won't take away lanes from the GPU.
All of the first generation of PCIe 4.0 SSD's were based around a single controller from Phison and the same appears to be true for the first generation of PCIe 5.0 SSD's.
The competition is simply not keeping up with Phison when it comes to releasing new products.
As far as the drive makers are concerned, it comes down to who can source what NAND flash, the ones that get the good stuff, will have the faster drives.
I would not buy above 18TB unless you absolutely need the space now. The price of the higher capacity drives tend to drop pretty sharply until they go under $280 and then their value starts retaining better.
I do really wish there we could see larger consumer facing SSDs than 8TB and with reasonable price tags.
Maybe not he whole machine, just the motherboard, memory, SSD's, & CPU.
The rate at which SSD price per TB has been decreasing has been extremely slow and that's in light of the fact that endurance continues to decline. Someone is going to have innovate in the field because continuously reducing endurance is not a sustainable path towards cost effective larger capacity SSDs. File sizes continue to increase so you cannot expect customers to buy SSDs of raising capacity but continuously diminishing endurance (mind you this will play over 10+ years).