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Unlucky7 posted:So apparently the new Xbox will come with an SSD for storage, but will also use the SSD as virtual RAM. Won't that burn out the drive that much faster, or am I misunderstanding something here? in certain theoretical workloads, yes it will wear the drive out faster. however this fact is irrelevant, for now, because it's not clear how the Xbox people plan to use it in practice. that is the ultimate thing to look at, the actual technical details of how their "virtual RAM" system operates. SSDs are still way slower than system RAM so they aren't going to be doing real-time 60 FPS calculations on the SSD virtual RAM
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Jun 10, 2019 01:36
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Lutha Mahtin posted:in certain theoretical workloads, yes it will wear the drive out faster. however this fact is irrelevant, for now, because it's not clear how the Xbox people plan to use it in practice. that is the ultimate thing to look at, the actual technical details of how their "virtual RAM" system operates. SSDs are still way slower than system RAM so they aren't going to be doing real-time 60 FPS calculations on the SSD virtual RAM Pretty much. If all they use it for is as a 16gb page file to store decompressed textures and setting-specific per-computed shaders, then it's basically a non-issue after the initial data-write. Given how much longevity modern SSDs have, even using it as a SQL server intent-log probably won't cause it to fail before you replace it anyways.
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Jun 10, 2019 05:59
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The virtual RAM is probably just there to give developers some wiggle room so running out of physical RAM is a "you dropped a frame" event rather than a "the kernel force killed your game and dumped the player to the dashboard" event. Requiring developers to stay in physical RAM 99% of the time rather than 100% of the time should make QA/cert testing easier.
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Jun 10, 2019 14:08
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It's entirely possible that the "SSD" on a new console could be something more along the lines of Optane, as a super-fast caching system for the game you're currently playing or most recently played. (and / or extra memory) I'm skeptical that a console will come with solid state main system storage, even in 2020. They have to ship with 1 TB of storage, games are too big for people to tolerate 500gb. Even with flash prices in the dumpster I'm not sure that fits in a $400 budget.
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Jun 10, 2019 14:57
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They're not going to add a regular hard drive, SSDs are cheap and are only going to get cheaper. Also, Optane caches aren't "super-fast". SSDs deliver the fast access to games that was advertised and save on manufacturing. Lambert fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Jun 10, 2019 |
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Jun 10, 2019 15:05
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Klyith posted:I'm skeptical that a console will come with solid state main system storage, even in 2020. They have to ship with 1 TB of storage, games are too big for people to tolerate 500gb. Even with flash prices in the dumpster I'm not sure that fits in a $400 budget. Sony and Microsoft are not paying anywhere close to retail prices for their parts, including ssds. They buy millions of units and they get massive discounts.
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Jun 10, 2019 22:50
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I could see the base model consoles coming with an SSHD, simply because the makers of those are *desperate* to get them off their hands.
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Jun 11, 2019 03:25
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3peat posted:Sony and Microsoft are not paying anywhere close to retail prices for their parts, including ssds. They buy millions of units and they get massive discounts. This, but it's very common for console/handheld manufacturers to sell them at a loss, especially early on, to lock consumers into their ecosystem, buying games at $60 a pop. It's the razer/blades model, so even if they're selling a console for $400, it might actually cost $500-600 and they're OK with that because every buyer is earning them ~$30 profit each month on a new game.
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Jun 11, 2019 06:34
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Atomizer posted:This, but it's very common for console/handheld manufacturers to sell them at a loss, especially early on, to lock consumers into their ecosystem, buying games at $60 a pop. It's the razer/blades model, so even if they're selling a console for $400, it might actually cost $500-600 and they're OK with that because every buyer is earning them ~$30 profit each month on a new game. My understanding is that is a historical thing that has been much less the case in recent generations. The one/ps4 consoles were sold more or less break-even. (The razor/blades model wasn't working because the large majority of game sales were 3rd party. Also MS took a bath on the 360 RROD and Sony had problems throughout the PS3 cycle.) Nintendo aims for their console hardware to be profitable all the time. But I guess I could see it coming back with digital distribution being mainstream now and the platform holder collecting a percentage of every game sold through the digital store.
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Jun 11, 2019 09:55
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I'm beginning to look at getting large SSDs and moving my spinning rust into a NAS, like all the cool kids are doing these days. If I was looking at, say, a 1TB NVMe drive and a 2TB standard SSD, are prices still coming down or have they pretty much stabilized? I don't know a ton about NVMe drives, but I see a lot of variety in the costs for 1TB ($100 up to $225 for WD/Samsung).
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Jun 11, 2019 15:27
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Binary Badger posted:The Corsair MP510, MyDigitalBPX, and a bunch of others are pretty much identical drives, all designed by Phison, all use Toshiba NAND, all have practically the same firmware also designed by Phison. Thanks for this. It's even cheaper on eBay - I'll do a trip report in a few weeks when it shows up. https://www.ebay.com/itm/303183663292
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Jun 11, 2019 17:35
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tzirean posted:I'm beginning to look at getting large SSDs and moving my spinning rust into a NAS, like all the cool kids are doing these days. If I was looking at, say, a 1TB NVMe drive and a 2TB standard SSD, are prices still coming down or have they pretty much stabilized? I don't know a ton about NVMe drives, but I see a lot of variety in the costs for 1TB ($100 up to $225 for WD/Samsung). i dunno about the overall trajectory but the price for a Phison-based 1TB NVMe seems to have gone down over 10% since i got one a couple months ago 
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Jun 11, 2019 17:49
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NVMe is overkill for NAS storage. Seriously. And you may also run into a situation where multiple NVMe drives impede the amount of PCI lanes usable for other devices. I say this as someone who's also looking to go fully SSD this year. I'm waiting for that sweet, sweet moment when I can get a 2TB Crucial MX500 for under £100 and I'll buy 2 or three of them for RAID. For file storage and media streaming you're really, really, really fast enough with a SATA SSD array. I'm hoping to retire my spinning drives before 2020. Maybe by Black Friday we will see 2TB SATA SSD's at under £100?
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Jun 11, 2019 17:58
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apropos man posted:NVMe is overkill for NAS storage. Seriously. And you may also run into a situation where multiple NVMe drives impede the amount of PCI lanes usable for other devices. Sorry, I meant using a 1TB NVMe and 2TB SSDs in my desktop and taking the storage HDDs out of it and sticking them in a NAS.
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Jun 11, 2019 18:46
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tzirean posted:Sorry, I meant using a 1TB NVMe and 2TB SSDs in my desktop and taking the storage HDDs out of it and sticking them in a NAS. Ah, no need to be sorry. I read your post on my phone and misunderstood. Yep, take the plunge if you feel like doing so. I've not seen anything that suggests regular SSD prices are going to stabilise, though. I'm projecting here, but I expect that the prices will continue to go down throughout the year. So it might be worth waiting a couple of months to see if the trend continues unless you are in need of of the storage now. It's still a really good buyers market compared to a year ago.
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Jun 11, 2019 22:17
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Klyith posted:My understanding is that is a historical thing that has been much less the case in recent generations. The one/ps4 consoles were sold more or less break-even. (The razor/blades model wasn't working because the large majority of game sales were 3rd party. Also MS took a bath on the 360 RROD and Sony had problems throughout the PS3 cycle.) Nintendo aims for their console hardware to be profitable all the time. Quite possible; I don't actually have detailed numbers to rely on. Occasionally someone will do a new hardware teardown and estimate the cost of the components, which may or may not be near MSRP. Regardless of the actual hardware costs, I'm predicting that digital software distribution is even more profitable for the store owners; whereas physical sales would have to give a cut to the various entities within the supply chain all the way to retail, the digital store owner, which is always the original hardware developer (Sony, MS, Nintendo, etc.) can just take a huge cut (e.g. like Steam's 30% or whatever) and their only significant expense is the cost to deliver the content. Consequently if the software channel was more profitable I could totally see the hardware being sold at a loss just to get it into customers' hands. tzirean posted:I'm beginning to look at getting large SSDs and moving my spinning rust into a NAS, like all the cool kids are doing these days. If I was looking at, say, a 1TB NVMe drive and a 2TB standard SSD, are prices still coming down or have they pretty much stabilized? I don't know a ton about NVMe drives, but I see a lot of variety in the costs for 1TB ($100 up to $225 for WD/Samsung). You can reliably find SSDs for <$100/TB now. They still seem to be slowly dropping, but if you have a need for storage now then just go for it, it's not like prices are going to drop in half by the end of the year.
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Jun 12, 2019 02:17
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oh hey a VIDEO GAME CONSOLE TEARDOWN PRICE ARGUMENT?????? sign me the HECK up for that poo poo
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Jun 12, 2019 03:50
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I'm so far behind on storage technology, it's crazy. That WD Black M.2 I ordered came in and even running at PCI-E Gen2 speeds, it's roughly three times faster on the read/write speeds than the SATA M.2 I'm running Windows from now. And even the SATA SSD is totally mindblowing to me, I have absolutely no idea what I would even do with speeds that are faster
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Jun 12, 2019 16:30
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Tiny Tubesteak Tom posted:I'm so far behind on storage technology, it's crazy. That WD Black M.2 I ordered came in and even running at PCI-E Gen2 speeds, it's roughly three times faster on the read/write speeds than the SATA M.2 I'm running Windows from now. And even the SATA SSD is totally mindblowing to me, I have absolutely no idea what I would even do with speeds that are faster Nothing really. For day to day usage, those performance improvements are not that massive. For benchmarks, for "level loading" in games, for certain operations yes, they certainly are mindblowing.
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Jun 12, 2019 17:49
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Binary Badger posted:The Corsair MP510, MyDigitalBPX, and a bunch of others are pretty much identical drives, all designed by Phison, all use Toshiba NAND, all have practically the same firmware also designed by Phison. Thanks for posting a link to that spreadsheet. I had figured that someone was tracking all the various nvme SSDs being cranked out with the Phison chip but never found anything in my search. How'd you find it or are you maintaining it?
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Jun 12, 2019 19:26
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That Google Docs spreadsheet is maintained by someone on [H]ardForum.com, I forget the exact handle. I had done some research myself and came up with a list slightly shorter but this guy obviously knows a lot more vendors than I do. FYI, here's another review of a Phison E12 powered SSD: https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/9023/team-group-mp34-phison-e12-powered-nvme-ssd-review/index4.html More comparisons against the HP EX920, Samsung 970, and others.. Meanwhile meanwhile, when PCIe 4.0 becomes more of a thing, Phison says they've got an E16 on the way that'll hit 6.5 GB/sec without any tricks.. https://www.pcgamer.com/phison-says-ssds-will-hit-65gbs-speeds-next-year/
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Jun 13, 2019 02:58
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It might be without any tricks, but I'll be shocked if it can do 6.5GB/sec without active or very elaborate passive cooling. And again, we're  ing over the quarter mile speeds of top fuel dragsters - 6.5GB/sec is nice, but pretty worthless outside of a few niche cases.
BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Jun 13, 2019 |
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Jun 13, 2019 03:16
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edit just kidding, the 256gb is $55 not the 1tb oops
skylined! fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Jun 13, 2019 |
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Jun 13, 2019 16:03
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Is there any kind of penalty in sequential performance for using IOs larger than 128k? All the drives are rated at that size, and my assumption was that it plateaued from there because it became bottlenecked on the controller or interface. My application works natively in 256k IOs but is configurable and I want to make sure performance doesn't start falling off due to some manner of architectural constraints (having to do IO splitting/combining internally for instance) when handling an IO larger than what they're saying on the specs.
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Jun 13, 2019 18:03
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I'd like to think the idea with having a command queue in the SSD controller is that the controller knows best how to complete requests in an efficient manner. So if you submit a request for a 256k read, but the hardware performs best in 128k blocks, the controller transparently splits your request. It probably has a DMA buffer managed by the OS either way, so your application won't know which block size was used to complete the request, just that your 256k block of data is now ready.
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Jun 13, 2019 18:20
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I find in my testing very little difference in throughput between 128k all the way up to 1M reads when using something like iometer or fio. The curve really takes off at around 8k IOs and flattens out at the peak at 64k/128k usually. This is with enterprise grade controllers and saturating a x16 link to a pcie switch with a fanout of 16-24 x4 nvme drives so ymmv
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Jun 13, 2019 18:39
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BangersInMyKnickers posted:Is there any kind of penalty in sequential performance for using IOs larger than 128k? All the drives are rated at that size, and my assumption was that it plateaued from there because it became bottlenecked on the controller or interface. My application works natively in 256k IOs but is configurable and I want to make sure performance doesn't start falling off due to some manner of architectural constraints (having to do IO splitting/combining internally for instance) when handling an IO larger than what they're saying on the specs. Honestly, just test it on the operating system and hardware combos you intend to use. I doubt you're going to find a formal spec anywhere. There's not even much of a way to know whether the OS is splitting your requests into smaller chunks -- that is, unless it isn't and you actually can measure a difference at particular sizes. Also, I have done some work on high performance file write code in a Linux-based data acquisition system and can tell you a couple key issues if that happens to be the OS you're using. One is that Linux wants to cache everything written to disk and perform the actual write out lazily, which creates problems when data is coming in so fast that you consume all of the machine's free RAM before it actually begins writing anything. Low free RAM equals the VM system actually trying to page stuff out, which is Bad. I was able to solve this by using the sync_file_range() API to force immediate writeout of data, followed up by posix_fadvise(..., POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) to tell the kernel to drop the cache for pages known to be written out. (If you call posix_fadvise() on cached ranges that are still waiting for writeout, Linux will ignore you.) The second issue is that, at least on the hardware we used, a single core was only capable of driving about 1.7-1.8 GB/s of write I/O. I had to multithread things to max out our LSI RAID controller at about 6.5 GB/s write throughput. If you ever run into a completely weird bottleneck, that might be it.
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Jun 13, 2019 18:53
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priznat posted:I find in my testing very little difference in throughput between 128k all the way up to 1M reads when using something like iometer or fio. The curve really takes off at around 8k IOs and flattens out at the peak at 64k/128k usually. Yeah, these are read intensive SAS SSDs on 8x controllers, that's basically what I was looking for. Thanks
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Jun 13, 2019 18:54
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BobHoward posted:One is that Linux wants to cache everything written to disk and perform the actual write out lazily, which creates problems when data is coming in so fast that you consume all of the machine's free RAM before it actually begins writing anything. Low free RAM equals the VM system actually trying to page stuff out, which is Bad. I was able to solve this by using the sync_file_range() API to force immediate writeout of data, followed up by posix_fadvise(..., POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) to tell the kernel to drop the cache for pages known to be written out. (If you call posix_fadvise() on cached ranges that are still waiting for writeout, Linux will ignore you.) In my case this is a vended product running on a openjdk stack so I don't have that level of control, but the devs claim that have already accounted for this. There's going to be either 32 or 64 IO threads firing concurrently per controller so I'm pretty sure between that and the workload being overwhelmingly sequential read that it will work out ok and come close to saturating the 64gbps of fabric I have on the controller. I'll keep that in mind though, we're pushing the envelope of what this vendor has rolled out before and I'm sure we'll find some screwy bottleneck.
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Jun 13, 2019 18:59
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skylined! posted:Thanks for this. It's even cheaper on eBay - I'll do a trip report in a few weeks when it shows up. Wow, that was resolved fast! quote:Hi
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Jun 13, 2019 20:51
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priznat posted:I find in my testing very little difference in throughput between 128k all the way up to 1M reads when using something like iometer or fio. The curve really takes off at around 8k IOs and flattens out at the peak at 64k/128k usually. I find precisely the same thing, and I choose to err on the side of 64k as that seems also to be a peak in S2D's chunking algorithm for blended office documents + non-DB virtual machine storage
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Jun 14, 2019 01:39
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Hey all, I'm in the process of planning out a build and just realized that there's a dedicated SSD thread, so here I am! I was reading back a bit and saw this spreadsheet, which was fascinating and super useful. Looking through the options there, I'm pretty inclined toward this Corsair at $125. I know I could do the Inland Premium slightly cheaper at $100, but this one seems to have a decent spec edge (especially on the writing side). Also, I know this isn't an SSD, but does anyone here have thoughts on the Toshiba X300 for an HDD storage drive? Last thing: what do folks here think about PCIe 4.0 SSDs? I think my planned CPU (AMD Ryzen 9 3900X) and motherboard (Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master will both be compatible with it, but it also seems like these won't be out until next year and that they'll probably take another year or two after that before they've maximized the technology and solved the heating issues. So, I'm pretty inclined not to wait for any of that, but maybe I'm missing something. Thank you for any insights you can share!
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Jun 14, 2019 21:09
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Don’t worry about PCIe 4.0 drives, they may be out in volume by the fall or earlier but even the gen3 ones are performance overkill in most situations anyway. 960GB nvme for $125 is so crazy, laff. Amazing how much prices have (finally) dropped.
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Jun 14, 2019 21:29
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surf rock posted:Last thing: what do folks here think about PCIe 4.0 SSDs? I think my planned CPU (AMD Ryzen 9 3900X) and motherboard (Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master will both be compatible with it, You still have some time before the new AMD kit is even available. I wouldn't be surprised if SSD makers are racing to try and launch as close as they can to when the compatible AMD gear does, so you will probably have better information by the time you need to make any final decisions. It looks like Gigabyte themselves are planning an Aorus brand SSD so who knows, you might be able to get it in a combo pack with your motherboard 
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Jun 14, 2019 21:33
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surf rock posted:Hey all, I'm in the process of planning out a build and just realized that there's a dedicated SSD thread, so here I am! The Corsair and the Inland Premium are both Phison E12 drives and should have very similar performance. I agree with the others that NVMe drives are already fast enough that you won't notice any difference between high quality models. I'd save the $25 personally. I've never heard anything on Toshiba hard drives, but its probably fine. Most people putting spinning drives in these days buy WD external drives and "shuck" the removable drives out of them. It works out much cheaper for larger models ($8TB go for $130 frequently) and the drives are usually WD NAS drives.
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Jun 14, 2019 21:58
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Hey thread. I have a 240GB ssd in my computer right now as the C drive and it's performing great but my computer meets the bare minimum for VR so I've been installing all the VR games directly to that drive for maximum performance. It's been going great except that I'm constantly on the edge of being out of space. I'm looking into grabbing the Samsung 860 500gb on amazon for slightly under $80 and doing a disk clone onto it. Any obvious reason to get a different 500gb harddrive? I'm cool with a cheaper 500gb as long as it isn't garage. As far as I can tell this current SSD is an Intel 730 Series (model: INTEL SSDSC2BP240G4), if that matters.
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Jun 15, 2019 06:01
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Should clone no problem with macrium reflect and that’s a great quality drive to get, evo or pro. Perhaps check prices on the 1TB drive as that’s the size I use for my games drive and even that I find a bit pinchy sometime. If it’s within your budget I would go for that so you don’t have to do it all again shortly!
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Jun 15, 2019 06:05
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priznat posted:Should clone no problem with macrium reflect and that’s a great quality drive to get, evo or pro. Hmm. I can do the 1tb. I assumed it would be 200+ but it appears to be 138 for the 1tb Evo. I can also migrate it easily to a new PC when I build one next year........ You've convinced me. Thanks!
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Jun 15, 2019 06:28
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Use Samsung migration tool as it is practically fool proof.
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Jun 15, 2019 08:56
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GenericGirlName posted:I'm looking into grabbing the Samsung 860 500gb on amazon for slightly under $80 and doing a disk clone onto it. Any obvious reason to get a different 500gb harddrive? I'm cool with a cheaper 500gb as long as it isn't garage. WD Blue 500gb is $60 on amazon (or $115 for 1TB) and indistinguishable from the Samsung Evos in performance. They also have a great track record for reliability. Samsung is absolutely charging for name recognition these days.
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Jun 15, 2019 12:22
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