Western Digital is Getting Ready to Launch the SN580 Blue NVMe SSD

[TheLostSwede]

It appears that Western Digital is getting ready to expand its budget line of WD Blue SSDs with yet another model, this time a smaller jump from the SN570 to the SN580, compared to the jump in model numbers from the SN550 to the SN570. The drive has passed through the PCI-SIG integrators list and from that information we only know it's a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive with a four lane interface. However, some retailers have already put up the drive for pre-order and this helps us with a few more details.

For starters, it appears that we're once again looking at drives in the 500 GB to the 2 TB range, although this doesn't mean that WD couldn't launch a 4 TB variant as well, but it seems unlikely. What we also learnt is that these product pages are place holders, as the drives are listed for the same, or higher pricing than the WD Black SN850X, which makes no sense for a budget drive which should be closer to the US$100/€100 mark than the equivalent of twice that. Another European retailer is also listing the current SN570 as being EOL:ed on the 31st of July, suggesting that the SN580 should launch around that date. The same retailer is listing the SN580 as the replacement drive under its part number, which is WDS200T3B0E for the 2 TB SKU.



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[Broken Processor]

Same price as the sn850 for a budget drive I'll pass. This drive will get lost in the churn and will mostly get picked up by OEM at a discount I guess.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Same price as the sn850 for a budget drive I'll pass. This drive will get lost in the churn and will mostly get picked up by OEM at a discount I guess.

It's highly unlikely that will be the retail price, but as we're most likely around a month away from launch, these Czech retailers put up a stupid place holder pricing for the upcoming models.
There are three retailers in total there that have listed the drives for pre-order.
My guess is that the pricing will be the same as the SN570 series that the SN580 appears to be replacing.

 

[Bwaze]

Why in mid 2023 no 8TB drives, and maybe not even 4TB? Are we going backwards?

 

[TheLostSwede]

Why in mid 2023 no 8TB drives, and maybe not even 4TB? Are we going backwards?

Because they would presumably be too pricey? There are plenty of 4 TB drives, even a few in the budget segment like the PNY CS2241 which goes for under US$170 in some parts of the world, although it appears to be around US$230 in the US.

CS2241 M.2 2280 NVMe Gen 4x4 SSD-PNY

500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB

www.pny.com.tw

 

[Bwaze]

How come it would be too pricey, if they brag about adding layers and using smaller processes every couple months? Crucial P3 4TB was about 180 EUR for quite some time, now it's back above 200.

It doesn't seem that we're getting much better deals in large drives that Samsung offered back in 2020 with QVO 870 4TB and 8TB SATA drives. At the same time manufacturers are bragging they can make 2TB and 4TB drives in ultra short M.2 2230 format for laptops!

 

[TheLostSwede]

How come it would be too pricey, if they brag about adding layers and using smaller processes every couple months? Crucial P3 4TB was about 180 EUR for quite some time, now it's back above 200.

Denser NAND doesn't equal cheaper NAND. It's more complex to manufacture, so it ends up costing more to make, but it's obviously not going to equal as much as using more lower density NAND on an SSD.
That said, the NAND manufacturers are charing more for their cutting edge products, just like DRAM manufacturers are, since they want to recover their investments into the new technolgy.
Besides, all of the NAND manufacturers apparently pulled the break on production of their latest high-density NAND as demand crashed, so it might take a couple of years before that stuff apperas in anything outside of PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The PNY drive is apparently TLC, not QLC as the P3 drives.

It doesn't seem that we're getting much better deals in large drives that Samsung offered back in 2020 with QVO 870 4TB and 8TB SATA drives. At the same time manufacturers are bragging they can make 2TB and 4TB drives in ultra short M.2 2230 format for laptops!

Well, there is a fixed minimum cost when it comes to making NAND flash, unlike hard drive platters where the material costs remain largely the same. As such, NAND is unlikely to ever be as cheap as spinning rust per TB.

 

[Bwaze]

Denser NAND doesn't equal cheaper NAND. It's more complex to manufacture, so it ends up costing more to make, but it's obviously not going to equal as much as using more lower density NAND on an SSD.
That said, the NAND manufacturers are charing more for their cutting edge products, just like DRAM manufacturers are, since they want to recover their investments into the new technolgy.
Besides, all of the NAND manufacturers apparently pulled the break on production of their latest high-density NAND as demand crashed, so it might take a couple of years before that stuff apperas in anything outside of PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The PNY drive is apparently TLC, not QLC as the P3 drives.

And why would consumers pay more for the newest and fastest drive, built on a newest and most expensive process, if it only means more expensive drive of the same size as two, three, four generations ago?

DirectStorage is still not widely used, and it doesn't look it will be in the near future, and even that doesn't show much difference between newest NVMe SSDs and old SATA ones. All that extra speed mainly gets you bragging rights and benchmark results, not real world decrease in loading, installation, startup times.

 

[TheLostSwede]

And why would consumers pay more for the newest and fastest drive, built on a newest and most expensive process, if it only means more expensive drive of the same size as two, three, four generations ago?

That you'll have to ask the drive makers. There have been some minor performance improvements, but yes, not enough for it to really matter.
That said, with current SSD pricing, you're not paying more for new models, unless you want a PCIe 5.0 drive. I picked up a couple of 1TB Solidigm P44 Pro drives for less than $65 each, going to replace the OEM drive in my notebook and use one as the OS drive in my next build in a couple of months. I also picked up an Apacer AS2280Q4U Phison E18 based 2 TB drive for less than $95 which will be my game drive. There are bargains to be had, as that 2 TB drive is less than half what I paid for a Kingston KC3000 around a year ago, based on the same Phison E18 controller. (yes, I'm keeping that drive from my current system).

DirectStorage is still not widely used, and it doesn't look it will be in thw near future, and even that doesn't show much difference between newest NVMe SSDs and old SATA ones. All that extra speed mainly gets you bragging rights and benchmark results, not real world decrease in loading, installation, startup times.

Uhm, I suggest you check out this account on YouTube, as there are alot of DirectStorage testing being done there and there's a huge difference with the latest builds of DirectStorage and more recent Nvidia drivers. The Crucial T700 is offering up to 33 GB/s bandwidth when it's streaming textures to the GPU as an example. So I would forget about SATA drives and DirectStorage, as they're not going to be competitive once we start seeing it supported by more games.

It might also be an issue in terms of lack of software optimisation for NVMe storage, as Microsoft and other OS vendors don't really seem to have spent that much time on tuning their operating systems for the kind of fast drives that are pretty much mainstream today. I would guess this is in part due to the progression to affordable fast storage simply went faster than anticipated.
Judging by TPU's own tests, Windows 11 even appears to boot one second slower on average compared to Windows 10, with the only exception being the old Crucial BX500 which boots almost 10 seconds faster for some reason. But yes, we've sort hit a wall now and need improved IOPS/random performance from these drives, but it appears to be the most dificult problem to solve with flash drives at the moment.

 

[Wye]

Getting ready to announce the paper launch sometimes next year/quarter. It appears. Totally.
2023 "news"

 

[Wirko]

In the case of the SN570, initially the largest model was 1 TB (reviewed by TPU) but the 2 TB version started appearing soon thereafter. Also the Kingston NV2, another popular SSD at slightly lower price points than the SN570, has a 4 TB version. It's quite likely that we're going to see a 4 TB SN580 a couple months after launch.

 

[GunShot]

I suggest you check out this account on YouTube, as there are alot of DirectStorage testing being done there and there's a huge difference with the latest builds of DirectStorage and more recent Nvidia drivers.

...and I suggest you collect FACTUAL data from the latest gaming events - e g. Summer Game Mess, ect.

There are NO upcoming **plethoral** of games using this failed DX12 Ultimate solution suites (if the MAIN conslows [PS/Switch] doesn't support any new technology, just forget about it going blasts, the mainstream devs/pubs will not touch it) and DS is only in a few games today, compared to over hundreds/thousands that's already on the market and/or upcoming future titles, that support this unicorn. And, DS also takes a beefy rig ($$$) to be fully utlizes and clearly Steam's most used rigs will not help aid MS's handcuffed solution.

No. DS is just another ignorant promise like HAGS, Game Mode, Mesh Shading, etc. (many devs have already ejected many of these failed DX12U features, even MS 1st-party titles are not using any DX12U fearures, that in itself should get everyone's attention) that ONLY a handful of users will cater to it, not the masses.

 

[bug]

And why would consumers pay more for the newest and fastest drive, built on a newest and most expensive process, if it only means more expensive drive of the same size as two, three, four generations ago?

DirectStorage is still not widely used, and it doesn't look it will be in the near future, and even that doesn't show much difference between newest NVMe SSDs and old SATA ones. All that extra speed mainly gets you bragging rights and benchmark results, not real world decrease in loading, installation, startup times.

In general, drives aren't getting more expensive. The was the recent shortage of everything which pushed the prices up, but remember, when SSDs were introduced, you would pay an arm and a leg for a 64GB drive.
Also, while NAND may not be going places as we'd like it to, there are improvements in controllers. 4k random reads are about twice as fast on a modern NVMe drive than they were for a AHCI one.

In short, I'm not feeling ripped off. But I do think NAND has hit a wall with QLC, curbing our hopes for higher capacities.

 

[Bwaze]

I remember, I paid 160 EUR for Super Talent UltraDrive ME 64GB back in 2009. And SSDs gained in capacity pretty quickly since then. But since we were offered 4TB and 8TB drives in 2019 and 2020 everything kind of stalled, and even those drives aren't mainstream after 3, 4 years!

 

[bug]

I remember, I paid 160 EUR for Super Talent UltraDrive ME 64GB back in 2009. And SSDs gained in capacity pretty quickly since then. But since we were offered 4TB and 8TB drives in 2019 and 2020 everything kind of stalled, and even those drives aren't mainstream after 3, 4 years!

Yes. because manufacturers can't get past QLC, so the only capacity increases come from additional manufacturing layers.
But when you can sometimes get a 4TB drive for a little over $200, I wouldn't say SSDs are getting more expensive.

 

[bonehead123]

Sounds like a refresh of the last updated refresh that was only recently updated AND refreshed

y/A/w/N....

I'll just stick with my SN850x's, which by the way, were just updated with refreshed firmwarez, hehehe ../s

 

[chrcoluk]

Well they could make 8tb drives easily in 2.5inch casing or on a pci-e slot drive.

The limitations are down to their own decisions.

I own currently 8 sata SSD's they would only be replaced with larger capacity models that match same durability/performance spec aka not QLC.

I own also 3 NVME SSDs, I think its a tough sell to me to replace an existing one with one that benches faster but has no real world benefit. The way to make me replace those again is higher capacity replacement without a nerf in existing metrics. This is especially the case for M.2, as M.2 is so expensive to place on a motherboard it has high real estate requirements, so limited M.2 slots means its basically high capacity only now for new M.2 purchases, my prime reason for the purchase of my DC-P4600 was the 2TB size to its cost.

It feels they pushing performance as the enticer to get enthusiasts to keep buying new models instead of capacity. I feel this is all linked to M.2 limitations. U.2 would have been so much better.

Image below to show limited board real estate for U.2 connectivity.

With U.2 drives been connected via cable it means the limitation for space is moved from the board to the case which is how it should be.

 

[Bwaze]

Well they could make 8tb drives easily in 2.5inch casing or on a pci-e slot drive.

The limitations are down to their own decisions.

Yeah, it's often stated that stagnation in drive sizes in SSDs since 2019, 2020 is due to the change of form factor - only now are we seeing 4TB M.2 drives being offered (outside of ridiculously expensive solutions), and there are talks of 8TB variants arriving in the coming months.

But I don't buy that. For one, we got plenty of M.2 2230 2TB drives before they offered us 4TB 2280 - an almost three times larger form factor!

Have you seen how ridiculously small the 2230 is? It covers the area usually taken just by the drive's controller!

 

[bug]

Well they could make 8tb drives easily in 2.5inch casing or on a pci-e slot drive.

And they do: https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-870-QVO-SATA-MZ-77Q8T0B/dp/B089C3TZL9
But the drives are still expensive.

 

[Bwaze]

The drive that TechPowerUP tested with a title:

Samsung 870 QVO 1 TB Review - Terrible, Do Not Buy

80 MB/s write, after the SLC cache is full, is way slower than even old HDD! And I'm sure TechPowerUP reviewer W1zzard couldn't know in 2020 that there wouldn'd be any competition in 4TB size until late 2022, and in 2023 there still isn't any in 8TB size!

 

[bug]

The drive that TechPowerUP tested with a title:

Samsung 870 QVO 1 TB Review - Terrible, Do Not Buy

80 MB/s write, after the SLC cache is full, is way slower than even old HDD! And I'm sure TechPowerUP reviewer W1zzard couldn't know in 2020 that there wouldn'd be any competition in 4TB size until late 2022, and in 2023 there still isn't any in 8TB size!

You were complaining 8TB should be possible in SATA format, I showed they are already being made. Sure, this isn't a great drive (or a good one), but it's not the only one out there.
My point was, these are being made, NMVe/M.2 isn't holding anything back. It's the price that keeps them from becoming more commonplace.

 

[Bwaze]

You were complaining 8TB should be possible in SATA format, I showed they are already being made. Sure, this isn't a great drive (or a good one), but it's not the only one out there.
My point was, these are being made, NMVe/M.2 isn't holding anything back. It's the price that keeps them from becoming more commonplace.

Nah, different person, that was a post from chrcoluk.

I'm following the SSD development and I've been waiting since 2020 to finally replace HDD in my PC with an 8 TB SSD - but I imagined competition would soon outclass the Samsung QVO!

Since 2TB 2230 M.2 drives are clearly possible, I can't think of any obstacle of 8TB M.2 drives - apart from price and maybe heat generation - and that's only problem for fastest drives, which "storage oriented" 8TB surely wouldnt target? Some 8 TB SSDs are indeed announced for later this year and for next year.

But I can't help but think this was artificially limited. Sure, the need for large drives has fallen rapidly with the advent of streaming in audio and video. Why would anyone, apart for content generators, need more than 2TB? Only now, when normal AAA game can take up way more than 100 GB before any DLC is there again focus on larger drives.

It's funny to look for older articles and graphs on when SSDs should overtake HDDs in capacity and in cost per terabyte - noone predicted years of stagnation.

 

[bug]

Nah, different person, that was a post from chrcoluk.

My bad, I stand corrected.

I'm following the SSD development and I've been waiting since 2020 to finally replace HDD in my PC with an 8 TB SSD - but I imagined competition would soon outclass the Samsung QVO!

Since 2TB 2230 M.2 drives are clearly possible, I can't think of any obstacle of 8TB M.2 drives - apart from price and maybe heat generation - and that's only problem for fastest drives, which "storage oriented" 8TB surely wouldnt target? Some 8 TB SSDs are indeed announced for later this year and for next year.

But I can't help but think this was artificially limited. Sure, the need for large drives has fallen rapidly with the advent of streaming in audio and video. Why would anyone, apart for content generators, need more than 2TB? Only now, when normal AAA game can take up way more than 100 GB before any DLC is there again focus on larger drives.

It's funny to look for older articles and graphs on when SSDs should overtake HDDs in capacity and in cost per terabyte - noone predicted years of stagnation.

Growth is not artificially limited.

Since the first SLC drives were released, capacity growth was based on manufacturing (more layers) and more bits per cell. Starting with QLC, more bits per cell is not an option anymore, hence capacities aren't going anywhere anymore.
Mind you, even if QLC wasn't a limiting factor, we would still be looking at diminishing returns: SLC->MLC 2x, MLC->TLC 1.5x, TLC->QLC 1.33x, QLC->PLC 1.25x, PLC->HLC 1.2x. Still growth, but never as much as in the early days.

 

[chrcoluk]

And they do: https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-870-QVO-SATA-MZ-77Q8T0B/dp/B089C3TZL9
But the drives are still expensive.

I dont expect 8tb to be cheap, however what about a consumer 8TB TLC drive, its possible, but where is it?

Yeah, it's often stated that stagnation in drive sizes in SSDs since 2019, 2020 is due to the change of form factor - only now are we seeing 4TB M.2 drives being offered (outside of ridiculously expensive solutions), and there are talks of 8TB variants arriving in the coming months.

But I don't buy that. For one, we got plenty of M.2 2230 2TB drives before they offered us 4TB 2280 - an almost three times larger form factor!

Have you seen how ridiculously small the 2230 is? It covers the area usually taken just by the drive's controller!

Yeah that looks about the same size as my M.2 wifi card. It even has holes where the connectors would be as if they used the same pcb base. If I remember right Microsoft used that form factor as well in the Xbox consoles.

 

[bug]

I dont expect 8tb to be cheap, however what about a consumer 8TB TLC drive, its possible, but where is it?

Here: https://www.microcenter.com/product...d-tlc-nand-pcie-gen-4-x4-nvme-m2-internal-ssd
And that's just 1 minute of searching.