News SSD overclocking yields big performance gains — overclocked SSD controller and NAND may lead to premature degradation or data loss, though

[Admin]

Youtuber Gabriel Ferraz shows he can overclock an SSD by increasing the clock speed of the NAND and its controller with some tools. Despite certain limitations due to the interface, he achieved some exciting results, including power consumption and overall efficiency.

SSD overclocking yields big performance gains — overclocked SSD controller and NAND may lead to premature degradation or data loss, though : Read more

 

[vanadiel007]

Imagine if they would have stuck for the 2.5" form factor for drives? Cooling would not be an issue, speeds could have been higher than current M2.

But, they had to go to tightly packed M2 directly connected to the motherboard. Now they have issues cooling it and are coming out with all kind of contraptions to cool them down. Who would have thought.

 

[Vanderlindemedia]

He killed the drive, at the end of the video. With just that small clock increase, the flash chips gave up.

 

[bit_user]

Imagine if they would have stuck for the 2.5" form factor for drives? Cooling would not be an issue, speeds could have been higher than current M2.

U.2 & U.3 drives are 2.5" and can indeed dissipate much more power than M.2 drives. The highest I've seen was an Optane SSD which burned over 20 W, at peak.

But, they had to go to tightly packed M2 directly connected to the motherboard. Now they have issues cooling it and are coming out with all kind of contraptions to cool them down. Who would have thought.

Yup. M.2 was a form factor clearly made by people thinking first & foremost about the laptop market. I wish U.2 would have a resurgence in the enthusiast community, but if PCIe 5.0 wasn't enough to make that happen, we shouldn't hold out further hope.

You can still get datacenter U.2 drives for somewhat accessible prices, although not as good as most of 2023. I got one of these for $311, but now it's up to $517. I saw it go as low as $276, right after I place my order!

https://www.provantage.com/solidigm-ssdpf2kx038t1n1~7SLDG02U.htm
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You can find plenty of reviews out there, but I've never seen anyone run gaming benchmarks on them. I think they should be good on latency-intensive games, like Starfield. Also, you can buy them in much higher capacities than consumer drives.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

U.2 & U.3 drives are 2.5" and can indeed dissipate much more power than M.2 drives. The highest I've seen was an Optane SSD which burned over 20 W, at peak.


Yup. M.2 was a form factor clearly made by people thinking first & foremost about the laptop market. I wish U.2 would have a resurgence in the enthusiast community, but if PCIe 5.0 wasn't enough to make that happen, we shouldn't hold out further hope.

You can still get datacenter U.2 drives for somewhat accessible prices, although not as good as most of 2023. I got one of these for $311, but now it's up to $517. I saw it go as low as $276, right after I place my order!

​

https://www.provantage.com/solidigm-ssdpf2kx038t1n1~7SLDG02U.htm​

​

You can find plenty of reviews out there, but I've never seen anyone run gaming benchmarks on them. I think they should be good on latency-intensive games, like Starfield. Also, you can buy them in much higher capacities than consumer drives.

Worth noting is that M.2 has an average power limit of ~12W (something like that), while U.2 has a limit of 25W. I don't mind the form factor, though, as it cleans up most builds. Stuffing in a U.2 drive means running two more cables to the front of the case. I was quite happy to stop putting optical drives and HDDs into my builds back in... maybe 2015.

 

[richardvday]

Worth noting is that M.2 has an average power limit of ~12W (something like that), while U.2 has a limit of 25W. I don't mind the form factor, though, as it cleans up most builds. Stuffing in a U.2 drive means running two more cables to the front of the case. I was quite happy to stop putting optical drives and HDDs into my builds back in... maybe 2015.

The M2 form factor is here because its simpler, for most people(we are not their target audience ) one drive is plenty. Simpler means Cheaper, more convenient. As far as cooling goes its just like CPUs , we didn't need fans at first that didn't come until later when the performance forced more heat into our cases. Back in the day the only fan most of us had was in the PSU. Now I have 7 fans not counting my CPU cooler or my GPU so actually I have 11 fans. So now performance has drastically increased so more heat means we need more fans. Par for the course.
I miss having my burner in the computer actually. Its much more expensive to replace the external drives. Also desktop space is always at a premium. I am not at all surprised about this efforts results. Nowadays manufacturers tend to overclock at the factory pretty much leaving very little performance to be had by the end users. There are still some golden eggs to be had good luck finding one though, the silicone lottery is real. I dont even bother overclocking anymore the gains tend to not be worth the effort.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Worth noting is that M.2 has an average power limit of ~12W (something like that), while U.2 has a limit of 25W. I don't mind the form factor, though, as it cleans up most builds. Stuffing in a U.2 drive means running two more cables to the front of the case. I was quite happy to stop putting optical drives and HDDs into my builds back in... maybe 2015.

I'm a big fan of Multi-Drive Storage Backplanes inserted into standard 5¼" or 3½" drive bays myself.

 

[bit_user]

Stuffing in a U.2 drive means running two more cables to the front of the case.

My cases still have 2.5"/3.5" bays right behind the intake fans, which is perfect for U.2 drives. None of this nonsense with ginormous, gaudy heatsinks on M.2 drives installed awkwardly on the mobo, and in a spot that might not have good airflow (thereby necessitating an active cooler),

I was quite happy to stop putting optical drives and HDDs into my builds back in... maybe 2015.

I still have optical drives in mine, so there!
: P

 

[bit_user]

Back in the day the only fan most of us had was in the PSU. Now I have 7 fans not counting my CPU cooler or my GPU so actually I have 11 fans.

Ironically, fanless PSUs are actually getting more common, leaving the PSU as one of the few places we actually lost a fan!

BTW, I have a special love for fanless mini-PCs. I have a fanless Gemini Lake Refresh that I'm likely to replace with Alder Lake N97, at some point. It's not my main PC, but rather an always-on media server.

 

[Amdlova]

Worth noting is that M.2 has an average power limit of ~12W (something like that), while U.2 has a limit of 25W. I don't mind the form factor, though, as it cleans up most builds. Stuffing in a U.2 drive means running two more cables to the front of the case. I was quite happy to stop putting optical drives and HDDs into my builds back in... maybe 2015.

12w of powa in PC... some notebook manufacturers recommend using maximum 2tb... because don't have the minimum specs of the m.2 standard.

 

[kaalus]

What's the point? My Windows 11 can delete maybe 100 or 200 files per second on my 990Pro, which according to spec can do 1.5million IOPS. So it would seem, it takes 15,000 I/O operations to delete a single file in NTFS? That's crazy inoptimal. Even in a journalled filesystem it should not take more than 2 or 3.

So, don't overclock your SSDs - optimize NTFS, or ditch Windows.

 

[The Historical Fidelity]

My cases still have 2.5"/3.5" bays right behind the intake fans, which is perfect for U.2 drives. None of this nonsense with ginormous, gaudy heatsinks on M.2 drives installed awkwardly on the mobo, and in a spot that might not have good airflow (thereby necessitating an active cooler),


I still have optical drives in mine, so there!
: P

Same here, still rocking the same DVD-RW drive I bought new in 2000’s. Has come in handy a few times over the years!

 

[The Historical Fidelity]

What's the point? My Windows 11 can delete maybe 100 or 200 files per second on my 990Pro, which according to spec can do 1.5million IOPS. So it would seem, it takes 15,000 I/O operations to delete a single file in NTFS? That's crazy inoptimal. Even in a journalled filesystem it should not take more than 2 or 3.

So, don't overclock your SSDs - optimize NTFS, or ditch Windows.

Run the Samsung magician benchmark on that 990 pro and you’ll see it does not get near that 1.5 million IOPS. There are many variables that affect an SSD’s real world performance.

 

[SethNW]

Imagine if they would have stuck for the 2.5" form factor for drives? Cooling would not be an issue, speeds could have been higher than current M2.

But, they had to go to tightly packed M2 directly connected to the motherboard. Now they have issues cooling it and are coming out with all kind of contraptions to cool them down. Who would have thought.

In all honesty, O do like simplicity of M.2, no extra cables, takes less space,... Sure it has power and cooling limitations, it was designed for laptops market and that probably helped it to take over as it can be most universally used by the biggest group, which is your average Joe. Enthusiasts are tiny group in comparison. Though to be fair, in everyday use and gaming, M.2 limitations aren't that bad, unless you buy very hot top end NVMe SSD, which us usually what I don't do. I do prefer to have parts that are reasonable to cool and perform well.

 

[bit_user]

What's the point?

I guess that the chips in these things are sometimes running well below spec?

My Windows 11 can delete maybe 100 or 200 files per second on my 990Pro, which according to spec can do 1.5million IOPS.

First, these are sequential operations. So, the baseline figure you should be using is ~25 kIOPS:

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-990-pro-ssd-review/2
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So it would seem, it takes 15,000 I/O operations to delete a single file in NTFS? That's crazy inoptimal.

Hmmm... try disabling any on-access virus scanning.

Even in a journalled filesystem it should not take more than 2 or 3.

That's much too low. Remember, you don't just have to delete the file and its metadata, but also update the directory metadata. Some of these are also read-modify-write operations. Still, I'd expect you're off by maybe an order of magnitude - not like four!

I wonder if Windows' indexing service is involved, at all? Maybe it's also checking to see if each deleted file is included in the search database and clearing out the corresponding database entries.

Anyway, using the baseline 25 kIOPS figure, and assuming there's on the order of 20 some I/O operations needed per file, then the expected rate is more like 1k files/sec. So, your observed performance is only off by 1 order of magnitude. That's still bad, but not as crazy as you thought.

So, don't overclock your SSDs - optimize NTFS, or ditch Windows.

Well, it was a SATA drive, for one thing. I think the effort wasn't about achieving crazy performance so much as just tinkering for its own sake (or for "content", if I'm being cynical).

 

[bit_user]

In all honesty, O do like simplicity of M.2, no extra cables, takes less space,...

I'm sure space & cost savings are why the industry likes them. Unlike SATA, you don't have the costs of the drive casing + cables. Industry can also use smaller form factor cases (i.e. mini-PCs).

Enthusiasts are tiny group in comparison. Though to be fair, in everyday use and gaming,

Yeah, but there are enough enthusiasts doing things like making RAIDs with them to have supported a small market of PCIe cards as M.2 drive carriers.

I think, if some enthusiast boards would just have oculink headers, maybe we'd see a few SSD makers pitch their U.2 drives outside the enterprise market.

M.2 limitations aren't that bad, unless you buy very hot top end NVMe SSD, which us usually what I don't do.

Eh, I just don't like my storage being cooked. Between getting hit by waste heat from GPUs and sitting in a thermal dead zone within the case, the cooling situations for M.2 drives isn't great. Add to this the fact that many drives are double-sided, with the bottom chips being sandwiched between the SSD and motherboard, and the situation is far from ideal.

 

[GabrielFerrazTPU]

Youtuber Gabriel Ferraz shows he can overclock an SSD by increasing the clock speed of the NAND and its controller with some tools. Despite certain limitations due to the interface, he achieved some exciting results, including power consumption and overall efficiency.

SSD overclocking yields big performance gains — overclocked SSD controller and NAND may lead to premature degradation or data loss, though : Read more

First of all, thanks for all the comments about the video that i did.
I hope you guys enjoyed this fun project.

I have another one project, which will be even cooler, that we can dramatically increase the durability/endurance of an SSD.