Technology @lemmy.world Sunshine (she/her) @lemmy.ca 3d ago

Micron just demoed the world's fastest SSD with PCIe 6.x tech, a sequential read speed of 27GB/s, and yes, it's just a prototype for now

www.techradar.com Micron presented two Gen6 E3.S SSDs that are almost twice as fast as the fastest Gen5 SSDs currently available

Astera Labs and Micron push PCIe 6.x to new heights

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I just want bigger drives... I feel like we've been stuck at 1TB for at least a decade.
- You can get spinning rust all the way up to 32 TB in a single 3.5" disk and 8 TB in an NVMe drive. The tech is out there, but it takes time for the price of stuff like that to come down when there isnt much demand for it.
  
  I refuse to believe there isn't much demand for it when we have MicroSD cards approaching 2TB.
  
  There's lots of demand for large drives, it's mostly for enterprise drives though.
  
  There are 32 and 64TB enterprise SSDs out there now too.
- SSDs have gotten much cheaper. 10 years ago, they were over $0.50/GB, now they're just over $0.04/GB That's over 12 times cheaper.
  
  You can get a 2tb ssd for $85. 10 years ago a 2tb ssd would've been super expensive and very boogie.
  
  SSDs were even cheaper until memory manufacturers decided it was getting too cheap: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/ssd-prices-predicted-to-skyrocket-throughout-2024
  
  They predicted prices would go higher and, through the magic of intentionally constricting supply, it happened. Prices still have not dropped back down to where they were in 2023.
  
  Where can you get a 2TB SSD for $85? Most 2TB SSD's I've seen cost about €120 with the cheapest going down to €98.
- Yeah, my 2013 black 1TB cost like 100€ so 12 years ago, prices are going down but not really falling off a cliff lol.
- What are you talking about?
  
  My laptop SSD is 2tb and I got it 3 years ago.
  
  One step above what I had back in 2012? What exactly does that say about progress in capacity?
The next monster hunter is gonna require this in the specs
Impressive. Very nice. Now let's see the random read/write speed.
- Let’s see Paul Allen’s io.
It’s late and with all the other politics in my feed, I read that as Macron at first, and spent longer than I want to admit seriously imagining him on stage demoing this to show a new French foray into tech or something
When do we start needing active coolers for our drives?
- i have a samsung 2.5" ssd and it actually would benefit from active cooling. when i installed my os, downloaded my steam games, and then made a copy of one (because steam insists on updating which breaks mods) and noticed that write speed was slow af...so i tested with kdiskmark and all speeds were exactly at 75mb/s while they should be at like 550. it throttled to keep temperature under 60c.
- Now.
- Enterprise NVMe drives have some active cooling, but it's mostly due to high density
It wasn't that long ago when RAM had similar transfer speeds.

With PCIe 6, consumer grade SSDs shouldn't need more than a single lane. That will be nice since AMD and Intel have been pretty skimpy with the PCIe lanes lately.
- the problem at least in the shortrun, is that if you got that many ssds running in single lane on a consumer platform at the likely inflated cost the drives would be, it would almost be cheaper just to get the workstation platform at that point.
- What about latency though?
  
  The latency of RAM has been around 10ns for the last couple decades. The latency of a good NVMe SSD is about 1000 times worse than RAM.
It will still be sold at a fraction of what Apple charges for their far inferior SSDs.
Sequential read/write is very rarely interesting, cool to see it's possible though. Random read/write and IOPS are much more important for daily use, preferably numbers without cache. Better cell endurance is always a bonus too, though I have yet to have a SSD die on me, probably just luck at this point.
Okay cool, but post the random IOPs please.
I have never once been about to tell a real world difference in SSD speeds. Until OS I/O code improves, faster SSDs don't excite me.
- There was a jump between old early gen SATA SSDs and modern NVMe in my opinion, but it's really only noticable if you're running something like a game with a huge amount of data to load, and you're actively comparing the two.
  
  My old PC had several different hard drives of differing types and I'd periodically be too lazy to move a game from one drive to another so I'd play it off different drives over a period of time, and was able to compare the loading times.
  
  So I'd say they're faster, but it's nowhere near the leap that HDD to SSD was.
  
  I agree. HDD to SSD was a huge leap. NVME was a small, sometimes noticable upgrade. Past that, I can't tell a difference. And it's hard to get excited about the hardware updates when the software can't use it.
If I ever get my hands on one, I will once again have a write speed faster than my download speed. It'll be like the 90's again! :D
- like the ’90s* again!
I wonder if we reach to the point we're RAM would be unnecessary.
- 27GB/s is faster than DDR4 RAM.
  
  Just wait until they come out with DDR4 SAM.

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