News Other PCIe 5.0 SSDs are Also Crashing Instead of Throttling

[palladin9479]

M.2 wasn't ever really designed for cooling, it was for notebooks and other thin devices. Using NVME with M.2 has made permanent storage stupidly fast, but now we are seeing the very real limits of the form factor. Using a PCIe riser card complete with HSF would likely be the next step, it worked for GPUs and is already used for enterprise class mega NVME devices.

 

[bit_user]

Using a PCIe riser card complete with HSF would likely be the next step, it worked for GPUs

The original PCIe SSDs were actually like that:

​

OCZ’s RevoDrive X2: When A Fast PCIe SSD Isn’t Fast Enough

In a storage market where it's easiest to take one vendor's controller, another vendor's NAND flash, and put the two in a standard 2.5" SATA drive, OCZ continues innovating, giving IT professionals and power users more performance with its RevoDrive X2.

www.tomshardware.com

​

Then, shortly before the M.2 form factor came onto the scene, Intel launched probably the very first NVMe 1.0 SSD as a PCIe add-in card:

​

Intel Unleashes NVMe SSD 750 Series For Consumer PCs

Intel dropped the fastest consumer-oriented SSD in the world, the NVMe Intel SSD 750 Series.

www.tomshardware.com

​

and is already used for enterprise class mega NVME devices.

I have the datacenter version of this drive, BTW. I think the add-in-card form factor stuck around a little bit longer, in that market.

Then, they did it again, with their 900p (and subsequent 905p):

​

Intel Optane SSD 900P Review: 3D XPoint Unleashed (Update)

There isn't a bush to beat around. The new Intel Optane SSD 900P ran it over along with the competition. This is the fastest consumer SSD ever, but it lacks capacity. 280GB and 480GB drives will ship this week, but the cost will be Optane.

www.tomshardware.com

(Bonus: look who wrote that review!)​

​

I went searching for a P5800X in that form factor, but I think it only ever shipped as a 2.5" U.2 drive. Speaking of which, there's a lot to be said for that form-factor. It can accommodate a lot more NAND chips than a M.2 board and many cases have front intake fans mounted right in front of their 2.5" drive cage. This makes it pretty much ideal for a high-powered, passively-cooled SSD. Especially one with a gnarly heatsink/enclosure like the P5800X:

​

Intel Optane SSD DC P5800X Review: The Fastest SSD Ever Made

The fastest just got faster

www.tomshardware.com

These days, some new form factors have joined U.2 2.5" to rule the datacenter SSD market:

​

 

[palladin9479]

Highpoint still makes them,

https://www.highpoint-tech.com/nvme1/ssd7540

Can attach 8 NVME PCIe gen 4 drives and the card has it's own active cooling. If PCIe Gen 5 starts to take off we'll be seeing a return to those cards since M.2 just doesn't have enough space natively for good cooling solutions.

 

[CRamseyer]

Highpoint still makes them,

https://www.highpoint-tech.com/nvme1/ssd7540

Can attach 8 NVME PCIe gen 4 drives and the card has it's own active cooling. If PCIe Gen 5 starts to take off we'll be seeing a return to those cards since M.2 just doesn't have enough space natively for good cooling solutions.

There is already work being done on PCIe cards for Gen5 drives where you can fit several M.2 drives on a single card. Gigabyte has already announced one.

As for m.2 being dead for future use (another comment above), there is also a PCI-SIG doc with a new connector that increases the power going to do the drive called M.2-1A (1 amp). The current power limit for the m.2 connector is 11.55w. I forget off the top of my head what the new connector allows for but it is a significant increase.

 

[palladin9479]

There is already work being done on PCIe cards for Gen5 drives where you can fit several M.2 drives on a single card. Gigabyte has already announced one.

As for m.2 being dead for future use (another comment above), there is also a PCI-SIG doc with a new connector that increases the power going to do the drive called M.2-1A (1 amp). The current power limit for the m.2 connector is 11.55w. I forget off the top of my head what the new connector allows for but it is a significant increase.

M2 is certainly not dead for future use, it's simply has a very hard thermal dissipation limit. As long as the device stays under the TDP limit then it can keep going forward without issue.