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Weirdly good eBay deal on a 7.68TB PCIe 4.0 U.3 drive. 6500MB/s, 1.1M+IOPs, 1.5DWPD (15PBW ish) for $1400. Much cheaper than the 8TB QLC drives but way more performance and endurance. PE8010 7.68TB eBay server deals are fun, I saw a load of Cascade Lake 24c Xeons for $350 AUD recently for a hilarious amount of cores in 2p for cheap.
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Jun 17, 2021 16:35
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So I got a WD black 1tb gen 3 on my x570 motherboard right now. I'll be doing a lot of animation work on this thing. (My other hard drive right now is a 6tb x300 7200rpm toshiba for backups and bulk storage - so having space to put stuff isn't a problem.) I can already tell that between the programs I want to install for art apps, the games I want to play and have on the m.2 drive, and 'working files' I will want on my main drives, that drive is gonna be hitting the upper limit really fast soon. I'm looking at options for what I'll put in the second m.2 slot. Any suggestions? Is it worth to go for 2tb for example? Should I consider gen 4, or is gen 3 just fine for now? Sidenote: The board is the asus x570 tuf wifi motherboard. The currently-unpopulated m.2 slot doesn't have a heatsink.
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Jun 18, 2021 07:54
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Spacedad posted:I'm looking at options for what I'll put in the second m.2 slot. Any suggestions? Is it worth to go for 2tb for example? Should I consider gen 4, or is gen 3 just fine for now? 2TB drives still cost more $/GB than 1TB, but if you've got circa $250 the upside is that you have limited m.2 slots. After you fill those, further expansion is still possible but kinda annoying (you have to buy a slot->m.2 card). PCIe 4 drives have a big cost premium and no appreciable performance advantage in current desktop apps & games. It will probably take a full development cycle before they start to matter. IMO they are not worth buying now, because by the time games come out that actively use that bandwidth they'll be a lot cheaper. Heatsinks don't matter, especially if it's a lower slot that's not right next to the CPU & GPU. Also a thing to consider is that SATA SSDs do still exist and aren't chopped liver. So one possibility, if you're pretty set on the PC you have being good for the long haul but worried about wanting a PCIe 4 drive in 2-3 years, is to grab a cheap sata drive. The discount is minimal -- MX500 1TB $95 vs WD SN550 $105, though at 2TB the $175 QVO is kinda attractive. The point is it's an SSD, sata performance is still totally usable, and is a way to punt on the decision. You'll always have spare sata ports.
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Jun 18, 2021 15:02
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Yeah I am also considering SATA. A lot of games can be run off those potentially. I'd probably keep my 'big triple A' or 'online games I want to have THE best load times on possible' on the m.2 and the rest of the games on the 'gaming/utility SSD.' I want to fill the other m.2 slot first though because it will be cleaner with less wires inside the system. After that, I have physical room in the meshify-c case to add 3 SATA and 1 more HD. Also on gen 4 - Gen 4 I am considering for my Blender animation work at some point, as that does have an impact for moving around very large files. But it's not a crucial priority for the moment, and I can always replace later when they get cheaper. Spacedad fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Jun 19, 2021 |
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Jun 19, 2021 05:01
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Klyith posted:2TB drives still cost more $/GB than 1TB, but if you've got circa $250 the upside is that you have limited m.2 slots. After you fill those, further expansion is still possible but kinda annoying (you have to buy a slot->m.2 card). PS5 games are designed to take advantage of PCIe 4 speeds. That's one of the console's most prominent selling points. Wouldn't ports of those be well suited to take advantage of a PCIe 4 m.2, or are we just expecting port developers to not bother?
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Jun 19, 2021 06:44
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From what I’ve read the playstation 5 has a bit of special sauce that really boosts the loading times beyond what a (windows) pc would do with a similar hardware spec ssd. Things like hardware decompression, a DMA interface and just how the data is organized and stored on the SSD would really improve performance. The nand controller is custom and has a 12 channel nand interface too where most consumer drives have 8 or even 4. I think this is so it can dedicate channels to pulling out assets into ram without anything interrupting it for the normal os housekeeping or whatever. Sony having control over all the parts in the chain really reduces any bottlenecks!
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Jun 19, 2021 07:12
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Windows is supposed to be getting some of that secret sauce eventually through DirectStorage, but it's going to be a while before that's ready to ship in games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zolAIEH0n1c
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Jun 19, 2021 14:03
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:PS5 games are designed to take advantage of PCIe 4 speeds. That's one of the console's most prominent selling points. Wouldn't ports of those be well suited to take advantage of a PCIe 4 m.2, or are we just expecting port developers to not bother? First, nobody's gonna make a NVMe SSD into a minimum requirement for PC ports until a substantial part of the market has them. This means that games that care about the PC market will still be designed in the traditional storage-vs-ram paradigm. And secondly, even on the PS5 it will take time before games are really using it. Ratchet & Clank is the first big technical showpiece, but I don't see the game doing anything that needs more than just normal SSD speed. And it's not because they're "not bothering". Games have been built around loading data from slow storage to ram since the PS1, it's gonna take some fundamental changes to engines before they adapt to a new model where you can use some data directly from main storage. And the consoles have just leapt directly from poky laptop HDDs to the fastest storage currently available. This is not a flip a switch scenario. In the near term I think games change the format of how they store data, so that it needs less CPU processing between load and use. That CPU processing is why many games have hardly any difference between a SATA SSD and the fastest NVMe drive. (Ratchet may already be doing that, the menu -> in-game load times are super fast.) That's cool, but also scales fine between slower and faster SSDs.
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Jun 19, 2021 16:16
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Klyith posted:And secondly, even on the PS5 it will take time before games are really using it. Ratchet & Clank is the first big technical showpiece, but I don't see the game doing anything that needs more than just normal SSD speed. Don't be so sure about that, ratchet and clank is moving a tremendous amount of data to make their idea work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YpCQrPRpE0
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Jun 19, 2021 17:07
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The whole thing about the PS5 "special sauce" is that it won't matter for 95% of games because the XBox doesn't have it. So you're only really going to see PS5-exclusives try to make use of the full 8+GB/s transfer, while anything that's planning on also running on the XBox will need to keep its I/O loading strategy viable at 4GB/s. And because of that, the vast majority of games that are going to find their way to PCs in the next several years will also not expect more than what a solid PCIe 4 NVMe drive can provide, if not considerably less.
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Jun 21, 2021 04:54
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Speaking of these PCIe 4 SSDs, the 1TB SN850 is $172 on amazon for Prime Day if anyone was thinking about getting one. There's a version that comes with a heatsink that costs over $50 more. Is there any reason to get that rather than some cheap $15 generic nvme heatsink if heat is a concern?
Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 08:20 on Jun 21, 2021 |
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Jun 21, 2021 08:18
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don't buy a heatsink! buy a known reliable drive. Unless you are in a severely I/O related situation, the extra cost isn't worth it.
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Jun 21, 2021 08:25
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E: after 5 edits, this has turned into useless nonsense.
Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 08:44 on Jun 21, 2021 |
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Jun 21, 2021 08:39
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DrDork posted:The whole thing about the PS5 "special sauce" is that it won't matter for 95% of games because the XBox doesn't have it. So you're only really going to see PS5-exclusives try to make use of the full 8+GB/s transfer, while anything that's planning on also running on the XBox will need to keep its I/O loading strategy viable at 4GB/s. And because of that, the vast majority of games that are going to find their way to PCs in the next several years will also not expect more than what a solid PCIe 4 NVMe drive can provide, if not considerably less.
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Jun 21, 2021 10:54
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Speaking of these PCIe 4 SSDs, the 1TB SN850 is $172 on amazon for Prime Day if anyone was thinking about getting one. There's a version that comes with a heatsink that costs over $50 more. Is there any reason to get that rather than some cheap $15 generic nvme heatsink if heat is a concern? Heat isn't a concern, they put a heatsink on it to sell to The Gamerz (The things that will cause NVMe drives to overheat, in a PC that's not a hotbox, are synthetic benchmarks testing stuff like max read rate. Actual real-world workloads do not cause as much controller heat.) EngineerJoe posted:Don't be so sure about that, ratchet and clank is moving a tremendous amount of data to make their idea work. So what I'd say is that there's this divide between the implementation and the results. The implementation, loading complete levels because they can just blast them into ram, is cool and impressive. And that could not be directly ported as-is without the fast storage. But one thing that is repeated a lot in the reviews & gameplay vids is that during the actual game, the rift things that do level transitions are totally scripted. It's like, you race a bug through a dozen portals, but it's a track where you have limited control. Boss fights transition through a bunch of random worlds, but the game says when and you're still in a boss arena. So the results are something that I am absolutely sure could be replicated on a different system with slower storage. You'd just have to be much more clever about it, break levels into smaller pieces, and do a lot more work. It's like, this thing that was normally hard became easy, which is very cool. That's good, game devs have limited hard-to-do things per game! But it does not budge my opinion that multi-system games coming to the PC are not going to require PCIe4 drives this year or the next.
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Jun 21, 2021 15:43
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Klyith posted:But it does not budge my opinion that multi-system games coming to the PC are not going to require PCIe4 drives this year or the next. I could see things like that not "requiring" them, but if you don't have a ~4GB/s SSD you'd either have to have more RAM available to do pre-loading, or you'd have to accept minor hitches instead of silky smooth transitions. Probably not a big deal in the end, especially since we're talking about the potential impacts on games that are not actually coming to PC anytime soon (if ever) in the first place.
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Jun 21, 2021 17:10
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I bet Sony’s big push for the custom hardware is to be able to reduce the amount of RAM required to cache stuff, with the improved fetch speed to flash it should be able to cut that down. Any place they can reduce commodity components like DRAM is a big win. Once the custom parts are designed it really reduces the bill of materials cost if the ram size is cut from what would have been required! Custom drive also means they can fine tune the over-provisioning exactly as well, also reducing commodity (nand in this case) part cost. It’s all about the pennies+ in the BOM because those really add up over millions of units produced!
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Jun 21, 2021 17:41
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drat prime day was a boon for SSD deals it seems like I wound up getting 2tb samsung 980 pro which haven't been on sale for like a month or so. Suck it chia I saw on r/buildapcsales the 980 pro post wasn't getting much fanfare as opposed to 1tb crucial deals etc. I know it's pricier in comparison but is there a reason for that?
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Jun 21, 2021 20:01
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priznat posted:I bet Sony’s big push for the custom hardware is to be able to reduce the amount of RAM required to cache stuff, with the improved fetch speed to flash it should be able to cut that down. Any place they can reduce commodity components like DRAM is a big win. Once the custom parts are designed it really reduces the bill of materials cost if the ram size is cut from what would have been required! Maybe, maybe not. If you figure that the fancy custom stuff here lets them save sticking another 8GB of RAM in there, that's only a BOM savings of probably $50. And in exchange, they've taken on the cost of custom silicon in the CPU, custom transport code, and custom silicon in the SSD. All of which I would strongly suspect end up amounting to more than $50 in costs, so I'm not really convinced they're actually saving money here. Replacing commodity with custom is a losing battle unless the custom bit lets you not include a LOT of commodity bits--you're never gonna get the same discount due to economy of scale on that SSD as you would on generic RAM, after all. Overprovisioning is a simple setting in firmware and has been addressable by even consumer-grade SSDs for years now. They didn't need to do anything fancy to get that ability--the 825GB size is due to selecting an (expensive) 12 channel interface instead of the more typical 8 channel interfaces. What they DO get out of it is the one and only hardware spec-sheet win over the XBox. And that alone might be worth paying a couple of bucks for if it convinces a few extra people to buy a PS5 instead of an XBox (or would have, had the whole supply-side of everything not exploded last year).
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Jun 21, 2021 21:05
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Alan Smithee posted:I saw on r/buildapcsales the 980 pro post wasn't getting much fanfare as opposed to 1tb crucial deals etc. I know it's pricier in comparison but is there a reason for that? Because the Crucial P5 saves $10 over the drive that is generally the Right Drive for most people, the WD SN550 1TB, while also being better. It's a bonus. By comparison, saving $100 on a 2TB 980 Pro merely takes it from Stupidly Overpriced to Questionably Overpriced. You're still paying $80 more than other good 2TB drives for the PCIe 4 that delivers zero benefits at present time.
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Jun 21, 2021 21:10
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youre tellin me a console feature that fans overhyped and overanalyzed might not see much benefit or use, well i never thought id see the day
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Jun 21, 2021 21:10
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Did you not notice how the Cell processor changed your TV forever??
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Jun 21, 2021 21:31
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Yeah, but you can be web slinging around the city in spiderman 5 seconds after selecting its icon in the dashboard (cold boot), which may not be life changing, but it's already way cooler than anything cell ever did (or pretended to do).
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Jun 21, 2021 21:50
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Yeah, but you can be web slinging around the city in spiderman 5 seconds after selecting its icon in the dashboard (cold boot), which may not be life changing, but it's already way cooler than anything cell ever did (or pretended to do). You know I heard Saddam Hussein bought up thousands upon thousands of PS2s because he was going to use Cell to build nukes. 
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Jun 21, 2021 21:55
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PS2 was the Emotion Engine[TM]
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Jun 21, 2021 22:41
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BIG HEADLINE posted:You know I heard Saddam Hussein bought up thousands upon thousands of PS2s because he was going to use Cell to build nukes. Perfect, Semi-perfect or Imperfect Cell?
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Jun 21, 2021 22:43
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I'm pretty sure Imperfect was the theme of his plan, seeing as how that worked out for him.
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Jun 21, 2021 22:57
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DrDork posted:Maybe, maybe not. If you figure that the fancy custom stuff here lets them save sticking another 8GB of RAM in there, that's only a BOM savings of probably $50. And in exchange, they've taken on the cost of custom silicon in the CPU, custom transport code, and custom silicon in the SSD. All of which I would strongly suspect end up amounting to more than $50 in costs, so I'm not really convinced they're actually saving money here. Replacing commodity with custom is a losing battle unless the custom bit lets you not include a LOT of commodity bits--you're never gonna get the same discount due to economy of scale on that SSD as you would on generic RAM, after all. While I don't think the PS5 SSD is going to matter all that much, I also don't think your analysis is even remotely correct. The price of engineering something custom is divided by the number of units you manufacture to arrive at a price per unit. And the thing is that game consoles sell a lot of units - PS4 is apparently over 110M units to date. If you assume it cost Sony $10M to develop their own SSD controller (a halfway informed WAG on my part), and assume PS5 will sell a disastrous 10M units over its lifetime, that's a cost of $1 per console. If the PS5 is at least as successful as the PS4, we're down to a dime per console. In other words, at gaming console scale, custom is easily as cheap as commodity because you're making your own commodity. In fact, at that scale, going custom can solve supply chain issues - no worry about your supplier of SSD controllers failing to deliver because they decided to allocate units elsewhere. You're talking direct to TSMC (or whomever), and you can write it into your contract that N wafer starts of the main SoC implies M wafer starts of the SSD controller, where N and M are the ratio required to produce a 1:1 ratio of SoCs and controllers. (I'm assuming they're separate chips here, though I don't actually know whether that's true.) Also worth noting that when you talk about "the cost of custom silicon in the CPU", well, a SSD controller is peanuts compared to the rest of the custom silicon design effort that went into the PS5.
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Jun 22, 2021 08:44
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BobHoward posted:Also worth noting that when you talk about "the cost of custom silicon in the CPU", well, a SSD controller is peanuts compared to the rest of the custom silicon design effort that went into the PS5. I'm sure you're right about this part, at least. As for the rest, it's not just the development costs (which honestly I'd imagine weren't all that much given that the hardware side isn't some super fancy never-before-considered shenanigans, just a somewhat modified take on existing tech), but the extra production cost vs an existing line/product. Maybe they were able to sign real nice contracts and make it all a wash--like was widely rumored for both MS and Sony's contracts with AMD for the last-gen consoles. But there's zero way that a custom-developed fancy-dancy 12-channel NVMe drive is cheaper than a more pedestrian 8-channel one that's already being churned out by the millions. So even if you want to talk about bulk contracts, a bulk contract for a high-end part is gonna cost more than a bulk contract for a mid-grade part. So you're still talking a custom-developed SSD for maybe 100M units over its entire production run vs some already developed, already in production GDDR6 that's measured in probably the billions (if not tens of billions) of units. And that's assuming they'd actually have bothered throwing in additional RAM if not for the SSD. Given that the XBox doesn't, I'm not sure that's really a good position to hold. A more interesting question, to me, is whether they did this because the price difference between normal vs fancy SSD was small enough they could do it to get a spec-sheet win, or if it was expensive enough that they put it in because they really believed it would make a difference (and by comparison they did not believe that a better GPU would be worth it). In the end we'll never know because neither of us will ever see the actual BOM and firm contracts that got signed to put the thing into production. I think we can also both rest easy knowing it'll never matter to PCs, because by the time Sony lets any Sony-exclusive get ported over to PC, 7-8GB/s PCIe 4.0 SSDs will be readily available even without any special sauce.
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Jun 22, 2021 18:24
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I think it's likely that part of the secret sauce is a particular compression and data format, that is probably hardware accelerrated and sent to the GPU memory without going through the CPU. I think there's some tech heading that direction in the PC space, but it's not simply a matter of having a faster SSD and interconnect when your CPU is going to go to 100% trying to decode and move it.
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Jun 22, 2021 21:14
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I have a MSI Z170A Gaming M7 mobo and it says "Supports PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe Mini-SAS SSD with Turbo U.2 Host Card" does this mean I will need the host card to use a nvme ssd or does that mean it can support cards that require a host card?
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Jun 22, 2021 21:58
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That board has two M.2 slots that can take NVME drives, you don't need a host card or anything like that. Be aware that depending on whether you put NVME or SATA M.2 drives in there, and which slots you use, it may deactivate some of the other SATA ports on your board.
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Jun 22, 2021 22:13
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Cygni posted:That board has two M.2 slots that can take NVME drives, you don't need a host card or anything like that. Be aware that depending on whether you put NVME or SATA M.2 drives in there, and which slots you use, it may deactivate some of the other SATA ports on your board. Ok looks good. I don't have anything on those deactivated ports. Happy Prime Day!
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Jun 22, 2021 22:38
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Is Samsung EVO still the default pick for a SATA system drive? My Micron SSD just reported a retired block and apparently when it hits 10 it'll enter read-only mode, so I need to replace it.
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Jun 23, 2021 01:08
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Crucial MX500 is just as good and usually cheaper, Samsung drives are still quality but they're overcharging for the name at this point Don't sleep on NVMe if you have an m.2 slot though, there's little to no price premium for something like a WD SN550 now
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Jun 23, 2021 01:13
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I've got 2 NVMe drives but they're dedicated to apps and I bought them back when there was a price premium, so they're both smaller than my boot drive. Don't want to deal with wiping and reinstalling so I'm sticking with a SATA boot drive I'll look at Crucial's stuff, thanks
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Jun 23, 2021 01:16
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WD Blue is also a good SATA drive choice.
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Jun 23, 2021 06:26
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Microsoft is going to require Win11 to use DirectStorage. If this goes anything like the Win10/DX12 debacle, it is going to kneecap adoption rates in games for years. Microsoft is a no good very bad shitass company. quote:With DirectStorage, which will only be available with Windows 11, games can quickly load assets to the graphics card without bogging down the CPU. This means you’ll get to experience incredibly detailed game worlds rendered at lightning speeds, without long load times. “DirectStorage Optimized” Windows 11 PCs are configured with the hardware and drivers needed to enable this amazing experience.
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Jun 24, 2021 17:38
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At least Win11 is a free upgrade from Win10, so the only real sticking point is Win11s higher min spec (TPM 2.0 required)
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Jun 24, 2021 17:41
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Yeah honestly I don't think it was the 10-only requirement that made DX12 support slow, it's the fact that DX12 was a huge change from what came before. The only people that were able to do stuff with it right away were the ones who already had been working with Mantle. Everyone else had a learning curve. Win10 was the dominant OS on the steam survey as far back as 2018. Adoption of the OS wasn't the problem. The better metaphor would be DX10 & Vista, where the fact that tons of people refused Vista really did have an impact. If Win11 turns out to suck that'll be a factor.
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Jun 24, 2021 17:53
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