News WD Announces SN850 PCIe 4 SSD, Dual-Drive Add-in Card, D50 Game Dock

[Admin]

Western Digital today announced its first PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive, the SN850, alongside an AN1500 PCIe add-in card and a D50 Thunderbolt 3/4 gaming dock.

WD Announces SN850 PCIe 4 SSD, Dual-Drive Add-in Card, D50 Game Dock : Read more

 

[patrick47018]

"familiar capacities of 500MB ($130) " Ah yes the value of the 500MB SSD.

 

[salgado18]

and low queue depth performance -- the latter being the kind of workloads that games and most mainstream tasks entail

I have a feeling that, once next-gen games start to come, and DirectStorage is used in full, games will need high queue depth. Maybe not quite a smart move, but it's also just a guess.

 

[seanwebster]

I have a feeling that, once next-gen games start to come, and DirectStorage is used in full, games will need high queue depth. Maybe not quite a smart move, but it's also just a guess.

I doubt it. Even after hammering most high-end SSDs with up to 8-10 large transfers at once, they rarely exceed a QD of 5-6 at most. The drives respond so fast that they stay well with a QD range of 0-4 under most circumstances, even for enthusiasts.

 

[salgado18]

I doubt it. Even after hammering most high-end SSDs with up to 8-10 large transfers at once, they rarely exceed a QD of 5-6 at most. The drives respond so fast that they stay well with a QD range of 0-4 under most circumstances, even for enthusiasts.

But then you could load every asset of a game scene in parallel, including sound, textures, models etc. A game scene can use hundreds of textures alone, so that can potentially throw the queue depth to the limits of the drive. I believe that's what the PS5 and XBsX do, and PC games will soon do too.