Originally posted by Kiyoris leave him be oceans, he's one of those people who can't admit when he's wrong
Except he's right.
Synthetic benchmarks don't have great translation into real-world consumer applications. A file copy test was the best they could come up with, and even that is something you wouldn't be doing too often (I hope) on a SSD.
If a gamer is purchasing a SSD, they want fast load times. A test showing fast IOPS doesn't always translate into fast loading times. There are more factors involved than just drive read speed. The CPU does some work, too. Some online games may also have slow load times due to the client needing to retrieve data from the server.
For now, the drive is mainly for enthusiasts who have the extra money to pay for a premium product which doesn't increase real-world performance by a great deal over current technology. For the average buyer, a SATA SSD should remain the primary OS and gaming drive.
it is doing...uhm..2,730 MB per second, that is a 500% boost over normal SSD, lmao, yes, you're going to notice that in real world performance lol. The move from HDD to SSD was not even 200%. Anyone downplaying how fast this SSD is = delusional.
The Quizzical person can't admit that it is not a 'rounding error'. If you call 500% speed boost rounding error, uhm, ok. Why bother discussing anything. You hate Intel or something I guess.
The performance difference in any real-world circumstances that a consumer is going to care about for its own sake is a rounding error.
Really? Here is simply copying a file in Windows. Real world enough for you?
3 times the speed of SATA drives is a rounding error again?
Because what people tend to do all day is to copy enormous files from somewhere on an SSD to somewhere else on the same SSD. I can't remember the last time I did that; the most recent time may or may not be "never". Remember that if you're copying over a network, you're limited by the speed of the network, which for anything consumer-grade, is going to be massively slower than any decent SSD. Roughly the same applies for copying to or from a hard drive or (non-SSD) USB flash drive, which are the sort of file copies that a consumer might well do a lot of and have to wait on. For small files, an intra-SSD copy is going to be done faster than you're ready for it.
Well , this exactly thing, you could have said it when SSD's have first appeared. "Why someone needs a hard with 540MB/s?"
Let me tell you something, I have seen a BIG increase in daily use ( Gaming and Programing ) when I first bought a SSD , and I am pretty sure that I will see a BIG difference too when the PCIe's will be released.
Just imagine , what this could mean for games ( let alone other departments ). Devs will not be so limited with details anymore. We could see hundreds of player's on screen with little difference in lag , etc.
We already saw "Megaservers" which I heard is capped at 10k players per server, up from 5k ( or so ).
Let's see if we will see a fantasy game in the near future, with EVE like core server ( 50k concurent users in 1 server ) .
That's BIG!
How fast is fast enough? Fast enough that it's not the bottleneck. Making component A faster only helps if you're waiting on component A. If component A is idle half the time because you're waiting on component B, then making component A twice as fast only means it's idle 3/4 of the time and you still don't finish any faster. But if component B is idle half the time waiting on component A and you can make component A faster, then you see big benefits.
If hard drives could deliver 100 MB/s of arbitrary data even in arbitrarily harsh workloads, SSDs would be scarce in enthusiast desktops even today. But the problem is that hard drives can't come anywhere near that; indeed, it's trivial to come up with a stupid workload where even Intel's latest PCI-E SSD can't do that. (E.g., give me every 93,825th bit on the drive--but not the rest, as I don't care about the rest and won't count them.)
But even under common, realistic workloads of, grab several KB here, several KB there, and so on for hundreds or thousands of small chunks of data, hard drives may chug along at only a few MB/s. SSDs can improve massively on that and deliver well into the tens of MB/s in the same workload. Even a SATA 2 SSD as was popular 5 years ago can be fast enough to rarely be the bottleneck in realistic consumer workloads. The seek times that were such a problem for hard drives are what created a storage bandwidth bottleneck, and SSDs are about a hundred times as fast there.
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Storage bandwidth isn't the only issue. If you want to draw hundreds of players on the screen at once in an MMORPG, Internet bandwidth to keep everyone updates on where everyone else is is probably the biggest problem. Trying to draw that many characters every frame without killing your frame rates is another big problem unless the character models are awfully simple or often identical.
For the average buyer, a SATA SSD should remain the primary OS and gaming drive.
Depends entirely on what the person does or what their budget is. Someone who does Youtube videos or something, would be greatly helped by a drive with 5 times read performance.
I use video studio a lot to take the clips from my camera of flying birds (own use, not Youtube), being able to read and write files 5 times as fast would massively speed up workflow.
Same for games load times, it will speed it up, how much we will see. SSD has been out exactly 1 day so tests are still rolling in.
Drive is around $350, not that big an investment if you care about speed. I will wait a bit, but still, amazing performance.
it is doing...uhm..2,730 MB per second, that is a 500% boost over normal SSD, lmao, yes, you're going to notice that in real world performance lol. The move from HDD to SSD was not even 200%. Anyone downplaying how fast this SSD is = delusional.
The Quizzical person can't admit that it is not a 'rounding error'. If you call 500% speed boost rounding error, uhm, ok. Why bother discussing anything. You hate Intel or something I guess.
The move from hard drives to SSDs was much, much larger than 200% in the small file operations that were such a bottleneck on hard drives. For example:
That's a SATA 2 SSD, and it beats the hard drive by a factor of more than 50 in some of the tests. Sequential throughput was rarely the problem, even on hard drives. Random access, especially random reads, is the big problem with hard drive performance.
For the average buyer, a SATA SSD should remain the primary OS and gaming drive.
Depends entirely on what the person does or what their budget is. Someone who does Youtube videos or something, would be greatly helped by a drive with 5 times read performance.
I use video studio a lot to take the clips from my camera of flying birds (own use, not Youtube), being able to read and write files 5 times as fast would massively speed up workflow.
Same for games load times, it will speed it up, how much we will see. SSD has been out exactly 1 day so tests are still rolling in.
Drive is around $350, not that big an investment if you care about speed. I will wait a bit, but still, amazing performance.
If you're copying stuff into your system from some external device, that external device is the bottleneck and a faster SSD in your computer wouldn't offer any advantages over a slower SSD. I haven't done any video editing, but I'd expect that you'd want to get that into memory immediately, and then not have so many storage accesses, though a faster SSD could save a few seconds when you load or save the video. Ordinary DDR3 is, of course, massively faster than the SSD that launched this thread.
If you're trying to store uncompressed video (e.g., take every single frame that your video card generates when playing a game and store them all in real time without any edits), then a faster SSD can help. But depending on exactly what you're doing, a RAID 0 array can be the way to go there.
The only thing you list where a good SATA SSD will be the bottleneck is copying files, and even then, that's only if both the device copied to and from are SSDs.
If you think that game loading times are an SSD bottleneck, then I have an experiment that I want you to run. Open Task Manager, then launch a game where you expect the SSD to be the bottleneck. Have a stopwatch, and time how long it takes the game to launch. When it's done, check Task Manager to see how much system memory the game process is using. Do some simple arithmetic to get (memory used) / (time taken), a measure of how fast you're filling up memory.
If everything involved in loading a game were uncompressed and nothing in memory were computed rather than loaded from an SSD, this would give you a ballpark idea of how fast you read stuff from your SSD in loading the game. In practice, neither of these are true, so it will massively overestimate things for you. (Well, game loading can also involve loading assets from storage, transferring them to the GPU, then clearing them out of system memory, but this is probably going to be compressed and you don't need many art assets loaded before you enter the game world proper.) See what numbers you end up with. This massive overestimate of storage bandwidth used is likely to be in the tens of MB/s, or at best, in the low hundreds of MB/s. SATA can handle that just fine--because it's not the bottleneck.
A good step forward but I wonder how long it will be before NVMe devices are "obsolete"?
Read write issues are a key part of course but at its simplest an SDD and an NVMe SSD is "just" a PCB with some memory chips on it. As the capacity of the chips has gone up the capacity of SDDs has gone up. Compare a modern SDD to an "antique" SDD and a lot of what is inside is empty air.
And given that the storage capacity of pen drives has reached 1Tb and a year ago the largest SD cards was 256Mb now you can get 1Tb on a nanoSD ... will NVMe's have enough time to gain traction?
A good step but I think being able to - legitimately - use the term "antique" SDDs speaks volumes about the current pace of development.
Anyway the drives are a great tech improvement. I've been watching this casually for a while now and am glad it's finally hitting the consumer shelves. Hopefully prices will come down. I think Quizz is right about the evolution here. Eventually SATA will go the way ATA/IDE, MFM, and RLL before it).
I'm not certain that that will happen; it strikes me as plausible that it will, and also plausible that it won't. It depends on the cost of construction and whether SATA offers any other important benefits over PCI Express (e.g., power consumption or broader compatibility). That's going further into the weeds than I'm willing to make a prediction on.
I'm not against the existence of these SSDs. As Torval noted, there are real workloads where this kind of speed matters a lot. They're just not typical consumer workloads. But a lot of products start out as some expensive, high end niche before ending up ubiquitous and cheap consumer goods. For example, computers.
I don't see SATA disappearing entirely anytime soon. SATA makes it easy to plug a bunch of things into a small form factor, and PCI Express isn't nearly so good about that. So I wouldn't expect hard drives or optical drives to move to PCI Express, for example.
I pointed out the vector graphics software because it was a ridiculous example. How big are those vector files anyway? How heavily does it hit the file system during normal working conditions.
Just because you don't understand vector software.
Corel Draw and many CAD suites have what you call "Assets", they're loaded during project load, it loads all vectors and bitmaps, whole folders, so I can access all files I need. They can include CAD files and other projects, CNC schemes, etc.
Vector projects are not just 1 file, they're called projects, and you link libraries to those projects, they're loaded onto a tray, and they're generally called assets.
Huge price point for marginal gains. I'm sure in 5 years It might be worth it...
But honstly.... How often do you REALLY need to pull something off the H/D at 2GB/s.
Although with those speeds I wonder how long ram will even be a thing. Looks like the diffrence between RAM and top of the line HD performace is becoming pretty marginal.
Although with those speeds I wonder how long ram will even be a thing. Looks like the diffrence between RAM and top of the line HD performace is becoming pretty marginal.
RAM has a different way to access data, it uses a heap and a stack, and the operations are far less expensive than those to a SSD. RAM won't go away.
A good step forward but I wonder how long it will be before NVMe devices are "obsolete"?
Read write issues are a key part of course but at its simplest an SDD and an NVMe SSD is "just" a PCB with some memory chips on it. As the capacity of the chips has gone up the capacity of SDDs has gone up. Compare a modern SDD to an "antique" SDD and a lot of what is inside is empty air.
And given that the storage capacity of pen drives has reached 1Tb and a year ago the largest SD cards was 256Mb now you can get 1Tb on a nanoSD ... will NVMe's have enough time to gain traction?
A good step but I think being able to - legitimately - use the term "antique" SDDs speaks volumes about the current pace of development.
The SSD is PCIe 3.0 with 4 lanes, even though the max throughput I have seen is 2.7GB/s, it can potentially go to 4GB/s. 7 times the speed of SATA 3.0. Shame some people are never happy here. You'll see developers take advantage of this with much higher quality textures and 3D models.
Sorry for the idiotic question.. But.. This is a SSD that fits into a GPU slot?
Wait.. Or is it a ram slot? God I'm bad at this.
Neither.
The "GPU slot" as you call it simply a PCIe slot where you could plop in anything that has a PCIe connector. It's built into the motherboard and is a nice and fast way for data to transfer between components.
Most GPU's are in fact, PCIe compatible and go in one of those slots. RAM has it's own unique dedicated slots.
Sorry for the idiotic question.. But.. This is a SSD that fits into a GPU slot?
Wait.. Or is it a ram slot? God I'm bad at this.
Neither.
The "GPU slot" as you call it simply a PCIe slot where you could plop in anything that has a PCIe connector. It's built into the motherboard and is a nice and fast way for data to transfer between components.
Most GPU's are in fact, PCIe compatible and go in one of those slots. RAM has it's own unique dedicated slots.
Right, thank you I knew RAM and GPU's didn't fit in the same slots, never realized the thing i slotted my GPU in was a PCIe connector.. Probably kind of important to know.. ^^;
This means that cpus will have to be maximized to use this power, otherwise as stating the only benefit is faster load times to a video gamer.
Since Intel is developing this with samsung then they probably have some amazing cpu's lined up for 2016.
For the lsat 4-5 years cpus have not improved by much. And really catered to mobile technology or Over clockers. I want a cpu that will run top end graphics on 4k above 60 fps without overclocking. I have not upgraded my pc in 5 years, and i ahve not even over clocked yet.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
This means that cpus will have to be maximized to use this power, otherwise as stating the only benefit is faster load times to a video gamer.
Since Intel is developing this with samsung then they probably have some amazing cpu's lined up for 2016.
For the lsat 4-5 years cpus have not improved by much. And really catered to mobile technology or Over clockers. I want a cpu that will run top end graphics on 4k above 60 fps without overclocking. I have not upgraded my pc in 5 years, and i ahve not even over clocked yet.
I wouldn't hold your breath on expecting some huge improvement in clock speed of a CPU anytime soon, if anything the only real improvements will be in the number of cores, its the same pretty much for gpu's, there have been numerous advances, but perhaps not in overall clock speed, which imo, is not as important these days as the number of cores anyway.
I'm pretty sure that if I swap this new drive out with my Samsung SSD that my 3 second zone load times in a game are not going to change much. We're probably talking a difference of milliseconds here.
Devs developing their games specifically with this in mind, or even adapting them before market penetration reaches at least 50% is only Wishful thinking, ...
Steam is gonna be the no.1 assessment tool for this, so keep an eye on steam hardware surveys, that's your best bet to predict when even basic ssds become a factor in game development.
Devs developing their games specifically with this in mind, or even adapting them before market penetration reaches at least 50% is only Wishful thinking, ...
...especially when these things (the new 750) only work in a 97 series board with upgraded BIOS or a 99 series board; everyone else need not apply.
"If MMORPG players were around when God said, "Let their be light" they'd have called the light gay, and plunged the universe back into darkness by squatting their nutsacks over it." -Luke McKinney, The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming
"In the end, SWG may have been more potential and promise than fulfilled expectation. But I'd rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity." -Raph Koster
Comments
Except he's right.
Synthetic benchmarks don't have great translation into real-world consumer applications. A file copy test was the best they could come up with, and even that is something you wouldn't be doing too often (I hope) on a SSD.
If a gamer is purchasing a SSD, they want fast load times. A test showing fast IOPS doesn't always translate into fast loading times. There are more factors involved than just drive read speed. The CPU does some work, too. Some online games may also have slow load times due to the client needing to retrieve data from the server.
For now, the drive is mainly for enthusiasts who have the extra money to pay for a premium product which doesn't increase real-world performance by a great deal over current technology. For the average buyer, a SATA SSD should remain the primary OS and gaming drive.
why ppl keep throwing synthetic around
it is doing...uhm..2,730 MB per second, that is a 500% boost over normal SSD, lmao, yes, you're going to notice that in real world performance lol. The move from HDD to SSD was not even 200%. Anyone downplaying how fast this SSD is = delusional.
The Quizzical person can't admit that it is not a 'rounding error'. If you call 500% speed boost rounding error, uhm, ok. Why bother discussing anything. You hate Intel or something I guess.
How fast is fast enough? Fast enough that it's not the bottleneck. Making component A faster only helps if you're waiting on component A. If component A is idle half the time because you're waiting on component B, then making component A twice as fast only means it's idle 3/4 of the time and you still don't finish any faster. But if component B is idle half the time waiting on component A and you can make component A faster, then you see big benefits.
If hard drives could deliver 100 MB/s of arbitrary data even in arbitrarily harsh workloads, SSDs would be scarce in enthusiast desktops even today. But the problem is that hard drives can't come anywhere near that; indeed, it's trivial to come up with a stupid workload where even Intel's latest PCI-E SSD can't do that. (E.g., give me every 93,825th bit on the drive--but not the rest, as I don't care about the rest and won't count them.)
But even under common, realistic workloads of, grab several KB here, several KB there, and so on for hundreds or thousands of small chunks of data, hard drives may chug along at only a few MB/s. SSDs can improve massively on that and deliver well into the tens of MB/s in the same workload. Even a SATA 2 SSD as was popular 5 years ago can be fast enough to rarely be the bottleneck in realistic consumer workloads. The seek times that were such a problem for hard drives are what created a storage bandwidth bottleneck, and SSDs are about a hundred times as fast there.
-----
Storage bandwidth isn't the only issue. If you want to draw hundreds of players on the screen at once in an MMORPG, Internet bandwidth to keep everyone updates on where everyone else is is probably the biggest problem. Trying to draw that many characters every frame without killing your frame rates is another big problem unless the character models are awfully simple or often identical.
Depends entirely on what the person does or what their budget is. Someone who does Youtube videos or something, would be greatly helped by a drive with 5 times read performance.
I use video studio a lot to take the clips from my camera of flying birds (own use, not Youtube), being able to read and write files 5 times as fast would massively speed up workflow.
Same for games load times, it will speed it up, how much we will see. SSD has been out exactly 1 day so tests are still rolling in.
Drive is around $350, not that big an investment if you care about speed. I will wait a bit, but still, amazing performance.
The move from hard drives to SSDs was much, much larger than 200% in the small file operations that were such a bottleneck on hard drives. For example:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-upgrade-hdd-performance,3023-6.html
That's a SATA 2 SSD, and it beats the hard drive by a factor of more than 50 in some of the tests. Sequential throughput was rarely the problem, even on hard drives. Random access, especially random reads, is the big problem with hard drive performance.
*game loading times
*transferring video from camera
*use of vector software
*copying files
*doing back ups
*installing software
*booting Windows OS
*booting of any software
bottleneck = SSD SATA
If you're copying stuff into your system from some external device, that external device is the bottleneck and a faster SSD in your computer wouldn't offer any advantages over a slower SSD. I haven't done any video editing, but I'd expect that you'd want to get that into memory immediately, and then not have so many storage accesses, though a faster SSD could save a few seconds when you load or save the video. Ordinary DDR3 is, of course, massively faster than the SSD that launched this thread.
If you're trying to store uncompressed video (e.g., take every single frame that your video card generates when playing a game and store them all in real time without any edits), then a faster SSD can help. But depending on exactly what you're doing, a RAID 0 array can be the way to go there.
The only thing you list where a good SATA SSD will be the bottleneck is copying files, and even then, that's only if both the device copied to and from are SSDs.
If you think that game loading times are an SSD bottleneck, then I have an experiment that I want you to run. Open Task Manager, then launch a game where you expect the SSD to be the bottleneck. Have a stopwatch, and time how long it takes the game to launch. When it's done, check Task Manager to see how much system memory the game process is using. Do some simple arithmetic to get (memory used) / (time taken), a measure of how fast you're filling up memory.
If everything involved in loading a game were uncompressed and nothing in memory were computed rather than loaded from an SSD, this would give you a ballpark idea of how fast you read stuff from your SSD in loading the game. In practice, neither of these are true, so it will massively overestimate things for you. (Well, game loading can also involve loading assets from storage, transferring them to the GPU, then clearing them out of system memory, but this is probably going to be compressed and you don't need many art assets loaded before you enter the game world proper.) See what numbers you end up with. This massive overestimate of storage bandwidth used is likely to be in the tens of MB/s, or at best, in the low hundreds of MB/s. SATA can handle that just fine--because it's not the bottleneck.
A good step forward but I wonder how long it will be before NVMe devices are "obsolete"?
Read write issues are a key part of course but at its simplest an SDD and an NVMe SSD is "just" a PCB with some memory chips on it. As the capacity of the chips has gone up the capacity of SDDs has gone up. Compare a modern SDD to an "antique" SDD and a lot of what is inside is empty air.
And given that the storage capacity of pen drives has reached 1Tb and a year ago the largest SD cards was 256Mb now you can get 1Tb on a nanoSD ... will NVMe's have enough time to gain traction?
A good step but I think being able to - legitimately - use the term "antique" SDDs speaks volumes about the current pace of development.
I'm not certain that that will happen; it strikes me as plausible that it will, and also plausible that it won't. It depends on the cost of construction and whether SATA offers any other important benefits over PCI Express (e.g., power consumption or broader compatibility). That's going further into the weeds than I'm willing to make a prediction on.
I'm not against the existence of these SSDs. As Torval noted, there are real workloads where this kind of speed matters a lot. They're just not typical consumer workloads. But a lot of products start out as some expensive, high end niche before ending up ubiquitous and cheap consumer goods. For example, computers.
I don't see SATA disappearing entirely anytime soon. SATA makes it easy to plug a bunch of things into a small form factor, and PCI Express isn't nearly so good about that. So I wouldn't expect hard drives or optical drives to move to PCI Express, for example.
NVMe definitely has me interested. I've been watching it for a bit.
It probably won't take off if it's a 5x price markup, but once it gets to relative price parity, yeah, I'm on board.
It won't fix every bottleneck in your computer, but yeah, I have my eye on it.
Just because you don't understand vector software.
Corel Draw and many CAD suites have what you call "Assets", they're loaded during project load, it loads all vectors and bitmaps, whole folders, so I can access all files I need. They can include CAD files and other projects, CNC schemes, etc.
Vector projects are not just 1 file, they're called projects, and you link libraries to those projects, they're loaded onto a tray, and they're generally called assets.
As with all new computer tech....
Huge price point for marginal gains. I'm sure in 5 years It might be worth it...
But honstly.... How often do you REALLY need to pull something off the H/D at 2GB/s.
Although with those speeds I wonder how long ram will even be a thing. Looks like the diffrence between RAM and top of the line HD performace is becoming pretty marginal.
RAM has a different way to access data, it uses a heap and a stack, and the operations are far less expensive than those to a SSD. RAM won't go away.
The SSD is PCIe 3.0 with 4 lanes, even though the max throughput I have seen is 2.7GB/s, it can potentially go to 4GB/s. 7 times the speed of SATA 3.0. Shame some people are never happy here. You'll see developers take advantage of this with much higher quality textures and 3D models.
A good experiment would be to look at some typical use scenarios from an SSD and then again from a RAM drive.
NVMe wouldn't be faster than a RAM drive, but that would point out situations that were really SATA bottlenecks.
Sorry for the idiotic question.. But.. This is a SSD that fits into a GPU slot?
Wait.. Or is it a ram slot? God I'm bad at this.
Neither.
The "GPU slot" as you call it simply a PCIe slot where you could plop in anything that has a PCIe connector. It's built into the motherboard and is a nice and fast way for data to transfer between components.
Most GPU's are in fact, PCIe compatible and go in one of those slots. RAM has it's own unique dedicated slots.
Right, thank you
I knew RAM and GPU's didn't fit in the same slots, never realized the thing i slotted my GPU in was a PCIe connector.. Probably kind of important to know.. ^^;
This is a good thing.
This means that cpus will have to be maximized to use this power, otherwise as stating the only benefit is faster load times to a video gamer.
Since Intel is developing this with samsung then they probably have some amazing cpu's lined up for 2016.
For the lsat 4-5 years cpus have not improved by much. And really catered to mobile technology or Over clockers. I want a cpu that will run top end graphics on 4k above 60 fps without overclocking. I have not upgraded my pc in 5 years, and i ahve not even over clocked yet.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
I wouldn't hold your breath on expecting some huge improvement in clock speed of a CPU anytime soon, if anything the only real improvements will be in the number of cores, its the same pretty much for gpu's, there have been numerous advances, but perhaps not in overall clock speed, which imo, is not as important these days as the number of cores anyway.
Devs developing their games specifically with this in mind, or even adapting them before market penetration reaches at least 50% is only Wishful thinking, ...
Steam is gonna be the no.1 assessment tool for this, so keep an eye on steam hardware surveys, that's your best bet to predict when even basic ssds become a factor in game development.
...especially when these things (the new 750) only work in a 97 series board with upgraded BIOS or a 99 series board; everyone else need not apply.
"If MMORPG players were around when God said, "Let their be light" they'd have called the light gay, and plunged the universe back into darkness by squatting their nutsacks over it."
-Luke McKinney, The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming
"In the end, SWG may have been more potential and promise than fulfilled expectation. But I'd rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
-Raph Koster