Adata SX8000 NVMe SSD Is The First With Intel 3D MLC

[alidan]

Samsung's 960 announcement made a pretty big deal about the copper-infused product label doing double-duty as a heat spreader. Do you actually read the news, or just comment on it?
; )

Storage isn't really my Kia Forte. Looking at this article, everything flies over my head. " IMFT's new 256Gbit 3D MLC NAND." It's like robot code or something. There's NAND, 3D NAND, MLC NAND, NVME, M.2, now all this weird crap getting integrated into motherboards. It's all just coming too quickly for me to take it in. What about normal 2.5" SSDs? Have those been forgotten? Is SATA speed maxxed out? Why not just make SATA faster? I think I'll stick with power supplies where I'm good at. Which is why I posted here, I know the power requirements of an SSD is extremely small, and since that electromagnetic energy is not being converted into mechanical energy (as in a case fan), it's clearly all going to heat. Seeing as 20W GPUs can be cooled passively, I figured with a 2W SSD it would be a breeze (pun intended) to cool it.

everything i say here is kind of iffy going off quick google searches and what i believe is right
nand I believe gets its name from resembling a nand gate or is a nand gate.
3d nand is stacked nand
mlc nand... ok, lets go this way
slc is a single state, either on or off, most reliable, longest lasting, most expensive
mlc is multiple states, from a quick wiki, there are 4 states, meaning that you fit more info per area then you would slc at the cost of lower writes and lower write cycles
tlc takes it a bit further then mlc does, and the trade off is even lower writes, and lower write cycles
nvme is "Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification" and is an effort to make a standard way to address pcie storage, from my understanding m.2 is also or falls under the same umbrella or is a derivative.

ad for cooling it... well... lets put it this way, a gpu is silicon on thermal paste on metal, about as clean of a transwer as you are ever going to get without doing something insane

M.2 is chip, plastic, at best thermal adhesive, possibly metal. or in many cases just chip and plastic over stagnant air, this crap has serious throttling issues without a heat sync, and even with, some still have issues, personally, ill take sata drives that are slower but run cooler over something i realistically don't see much of a difference in, going full tilt. Hell, I would argue 4 256gb drives and a 1tb hdd as a mirror in raid (forget what this kind is called) would potentially overall be a better solution... scratch that, just looked it up to confirm, apparently m.2 prices tanked, with 1tb coming in at under 250$... you aren't getting speed, but you are getting 1tg of sdd storage.

Ok, the first one that gives you speed is 500$, yea, you could get 4 kingston drives, raid them, and then mirror it for less than that ssd costs, it would also likely read/write faster too, but it wouldn't have the same i/o performance, but you likely dont need that in a home setting anyway, at least more then a normal ssd gives...

but damn, really, 1tb of ssd space is now 240$ from brands i would trust? cant wait till zen comes out so i know what my next pc build is even more now. 1tb ssd, 4tb game drive, 8tb storage drive... and if enough moeny is left over 8tb backup drive.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

I don't like the industry moving toward all PCIe storage. Does not this hog up lanes from the GPU? Plus most motherboards only have a couple of PCIex16 slots. Unless it's a x8 or x4 slot. I think having storage in the case and connecting to the motherboard via cables is nice, I think there's a certain art and beauty to it.

 

[alidan]

I don't like the industry moving toward all PCIe storage. Does not this hog up lanes from the GPU? Plus most motherboards only have a couple of PCIex16 slots. Unless it's a x8 or x4 slot. I think having storage in the case and connecting to the motherboard via cables is nice, I think there's a certain art and beauty to it.

cant say that i like it either, but that's more me having nightmares with older hardware that newer hardware does not have.

 

[bit_user]

3d nand is stacked nand
mlc nand... ok, lets go this way
slc is a single state, either on or off, most reliable, longest lasting, most expensive
mlc is multiple states, from a quick wiki, there are 4 states, meaning that you fit more info per area then you would slc at the cost of lower writes and lower write cycles
tlc takes it a bit further then mlc does, and the trade off is even lower writes, and lower write cycles

3D refers to the fact that multiple layers of cells are stacked within the same die. Then, some are stacking multiple dies. I think Samsung said they're stacking up to 16 48-layer dies, yielding 768 layers of storage cells. Removing heat from such a big stack seems like it could be a challenge.

SLC stores one bit per cell. MLC just means storing more than one bit. In the case of TLC, it's 1.5 bits, because each cell has 3 states. You might have 22528 of these cells per 4096-byte block, providing an extra 128 bytes for ECC.

If you had MLC with four levels, then you could fit 2 bits per cell. Thus, the same 4k sector + ECC would require only 16896 cells.

nvme is "Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification" and is an effort to make a standard way to address pcie storage, from my understanding m.2 is also or falls under the same umbrella or is a derivative.

NVMe is an interface protocol for PCIe-based devices that has less latency and more scalability than AHCI.

M.2 devices are PCIe-based, but many still support only AHCI. To get the full benefits of PCIe-based SSDs, you want NVMe.

M.2 is chip, plastic

Always? Heat being an issue, I'd hope some higher-performance chips would at least use ceramic packaging.

I believe the thermal throttling is done to protect the data.

apparently m.2 prices tanked, with 1tb coming in at under 250$...

Looking at newegg, there's a new (not refurb) Mushkin 1TB SATA drive for $235. A couple 960 GB drives are a bit less.

But I just bought a 400 GB Intel DC P3500 for $225. Less capacity, but it's more reliable and even faster than M.2 (it dissipates up to 12 W - try that in a M.2 drive!). Random read performance is 430k IOPs; sequential read is 2.2 GB/sec. It's basically an enterprise version of the equivalent 750-series drive.

Lately, I'm editing big video files and SSD on SATA2 is a bit of a bottleneck. I'm out of SATA3 ports (my MB only has 2) and I have no M.2 slots. So, I basically had to get a PCIe card of some kind, whether a SATA3 controller, M.2 carrier, or self-contained drive.

I don't like the industry moving toward all PCIe storage. Does not this hog up lanes from the GPU? Plus most motherboards only have a couple of PCIex16 slots. Unless it's a x8 or x4 slot. I think having storage in the case and connecting to the motherboard via cables is nice, I think there's a certain art and beauty to it.

I pretty much agree on all points.

I think we'll first see the number of SATA3 ports on mainstream motherboards and chipsets start to decline. Pretty soon, you might need an add-in card if you want to run a SATA RAID with more than 2 drives. And that will burn yet more PCIe lanes.

The other thing that's better about SATA and U.2 is cooling. You can mount the drive where you want, like in front of a fan.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Do SATA SSDs even get hot like M.2?

 

[bit_user]

Do SATA SSDs even get hot like M.2?

The first time I heard of thermal throttling in SSDs was in SATA models and before M.2 even existed.

 

[alidan]

Do SATA SSDs even get hot like M.2?

The first time I heard of thermal throttling in SSDs was in SATA models and before M.2 even existed.

never heard of the throttling from sata drives, but i do remember there were throttling issues with pcie drives, keep in mind this throttling was when pcie drives new/high end prosumer and sata3 was barely out, cant remember the last time reports of a pcie ssd had reports of heat issues while having a proper heatsink.

as for editing video, never had an issue with reading the video in editor, and I used 1080p60 recorded lossless compressed, though I could imagine if you had video files big enough it could be an issue, my problem comes more from encoders refusing to use opencl to assist rendering anymore, gave up trying to edit video till my next pc build next year as that should give me enough power to record video compressed so i'm not eating tb's of space and enough cpu power to not have my pc be useless while editing, and hopefully a cooling solution that also makes it a non issue heat wise too.

 

[bit_user]

as for editing video, never had an issue with reading the video in editor, and I used 1080p60 recorded lossless compressed,

I'm loading MPEG2-TS streams in avidemux. It needs to index the files, before you can do anything with them. So, it has to read in the whole thing. Since they're each a couple hours, it's causing me frequent interruptions.

Meh, it's not a huge problem, but I also needed a bit more space. The drive I'm using for this was actually intended for something else. So, I had to replace it and my only option for something faster than SATA2 was PCIe.

 

[alidan]

Yea, if I remember how big those files get that's a nightmare, but wouldn't a 400gb drive be a bit on the small side?