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Will PCIe Flash Become Common In Laptops, Desktops?
Lucas123 writes "With Apple announcing that it is now using PCIe flash in its MacBook Air and it has plans to offer it in its Mac Pro later this year, some are speculating that the high-speed peripheral interface may become the standard for higher-end consumer laptops and workplace systems. 'It's coming,' said Joseph Unsworth, research vice president for NAND Flash & SSD at Gartner. The Mac Pro with PCIe flash is expected to exceed 1GB/sec throughput, twice the speed of SATA III SSDs. Apple claims the new MacBook Mini got a 45% performance boost from its PCIe flash. AnandTech has the Air clocked in at 800MB/s. Next year, Intel and Plextor are expected to begin shipping PCIe cards based on the new NGFF specification. Plextor's NGFF SSD measures just 22mm by 44mm in size and connects to a computer's motherboard through a PCIe 2.0 x2 interface. Those cards are smaller than today's half-height expansion cards and offer 770MB/s read and 550MB/s write speeds."
In ten years we'll be using equipment that makes the current best look like pocket calculators, just like we're buying gear today for a few hundred that would have been worth tens of thousands ten years ago, if we could even manufacture it. Goddamn I love living in the future.
Um... what the hell are you babbling about?
At a guess, Firewire.
From the photos Apple has on their site of the Mac Pro with its cover open, it looks to me like the flash storage used is a "mini PCIe" form-factor. I've already purchased and used an identical looking 480GB flash drive to fit in an HP "Ultrabook" type of portable called the "Spectre XT Pro".
(HP claims the notebook can't be purchased with a drive larger than 256GB, even in a custom build order on their web site, but a technical manual I found clearly showed it took the mini PCIe type of flash drive, so I bought a 480GB from CDW to try it and it worked just fine.)
I've seen a few comments yesterday and today though claiming some of these mini PCIe form-factor SSDs are not *really* following the standards for the PCIe connector? So in effect, they perform with a lot less throughput, the same as any existing SSD drive, except just using that type of physical connector.
Anyone know if there's much truth to such claims .... meaning what Apple is offering here really will be more advanced than current SSD technology, or is this a case where companies like HP have really been using the same stuff for at least the last 1-2 years in select ultraportables?
While the speed sounds impressive on paper, SSDs are really already going beyond what is needed for storage speeds. You can try this by upgrading from a SATA II to SATA III SSD yourself. I've done that, and I even went from a slow one (WD SiliconEdge Blue) to a fast one (Samsung 840 Pro). Actual difference in system performance? Eh, I doubt I could tell you which was which in a blind test.
The big numbers are mostly dick-waving in a desktop setup. I think the advantages offered by a storage connector and controller are likely to outweigh speed.
Also please note SAS 12g is coming out soon, and that means SATA at the same speed is soon to come as well.
It just really isn't that big a deal on the desktop. For SANs, databases, other high performance shit? Sure, there are cases where you need more IO or iops then you can get out of a SAS interface and then PCIe or the like may be an answer. But for user systems, SSDs are already more than fast enough, additional speed gains don't seem to translate in to wall time gains.
Correct Tapewolf. USB came about because Apple wanted to charge other manufacturers a royalty rate on firewire that was higher than they could stomach. Maybe they'll do better this time around, but never underestimate arrogance, greed, and human shortsightedness.
How exactly will they do the same with PCIe and SSDs? Explain.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Flash is not meant to replace spinning drives.
Spinning drives are not meant to replace reel to reel tape.
The automobile is not meant to replace the horse.
Self contained modular components are always superior in ease of replacing and overall use to both the manufacturer and the consumer. If it's some one of a kind custom one made just for them, that's trouble because the manufacturer has them by the balls and it's just one supply source. The last time I heard of a company getting 100 "identical" Dell laptops, there were 4 different hard drive models in them. That's because of cost and supply changes. With just 1 item to choose from, that's bad.
Then from the consumer side, some modified BIOS that only boots off of PCI-E controlled storage devices and then not being able to use Acronis or GParted because it's a custom driver on a custom controller are both huge problems. Not being able to replace it with any 2.5" drive, just 1 single replacement option at a price-gouging 5x charge from the manufacturer is pretty awful too. Your upgrade options go out the window too.
Then it's just some anonymous nothing brand. There are 3 brands of SSDs that I buy and that's it because I don't want the flash chips failing in a year like Kingston SSDNow or Adata or Sandisk or any of those wacky off brand ones. HP and Dell are famous for garbage like rebranded lite-on DVD burners that fail constantly instead of something nice like Phillips so you bet it's going to be a true piece of crap.
Overall, it's a terrible idea.
That's rather some revisionist history considering that Apple used only FireWire and USB when they first unveiled the iMac. Also other MB munfacturers had started to include it but a fully working Windows implementation was years away. At the time it was USB 1 which was pathetically slow compared to FireWire and the two had different purposes. USB was for low data, low speed connections like mice and keyboards and printers. FireWire was for high speed, high bandwidth connections. If you wanted high bandwidth transfers, FireWire was the only good choice for pros. FireWire 800 is a different story.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
USB 1.1 wasn't bad compared to floppy disk capacity and read/write speeds.
How USB won is because it was the port that was a hell of a lot cheaper and pushed by Intel
FTFY.
If FW had been reasonably priced, there would now be 1 USB1.0 port on machines for kb+mouse, and 3 or 4 FW1200 ports for cameras, external HDDs, scanners, etc.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I don't yet own any flash drives either. I have about 40 magnetic drives. One reason I didn't buy flash drives was write endurance.
I recently found out that the newer Flash drives have the same or better life expectancy as magnetics, though. They have enough write cycles for like 40 years of hard use now, so that's basically a solved problem. Also, when they fail they normally become read-only, so you can copy everything over to a replacement drive. 18 months ago I wouldn't have purchased flash drives, but now that they have improved I will. To reinforce what I read, I have watched Flash drives perform reliably in busy database and web servers. Not that the eight or so flash drives in those servers are statistically significant, but it's nice when your own anecdotal experience is consistent with the studies.
Yes, of course one particular drive might last a long time or a short time. I've had magnetic disks that lasted a long time and magnetic disks that died quickly. On average, an SSD will last just as long as a spinning platter .
Intel developed USB without the slightest concern for Firewire. The two were largely coincidental. Firewire came about because Sony wanted a serial interface for its new digital video standard and Apple had some old lab tech in the garbage heap. Sony made Firewire a success from spare parts while Intel developed their own from scratch. Apple lacked the leadership to deliver any of it but had the gonads to claim all of it.
Apple doesn't own 1394, only the Firewire name. Never underestimate ignorance and revisionist history.
Sure they were. People may not have been using floppies to backup their hard drives anymore, but in 1998 a floppy was absolutely the standard way to transfer and store small files. It was totally normal still to type up a school paper and save it only to "your floppy" and put it in a stack of other floppies, and it was the only way to transfer a file to someone and know they'd be able to access it. Plenty of people didn't have internet, and nobody had CD-R's yet. Even USB 1 was fast enough to get the job done with the (then 16MB-ish) thumb drives that were about to become ubiquitous because they were certainly faster than floppies.
-Ted http://www.freemathhelp.com/
USB was on ALL new motherboards before Microsoft supported it in Windows. Microsoft required it for certification and then grossly missed their end of the deal.
USB was ubiquitous in PCs when the iMac was announced but was unknown because of MS's failure. Apple simply grabbed mature technology off the shelf and claimed to be the visionary.
The irony was that USB's primary reason for existence was to replace legacy IO yet Apple claimed to be the forward-thinking company that invented the concept. Legacy-free was the idea that gave birth to USB and it was fully formed and mature when Apple swiped it.
Firewire's reason for existence was far less grand than people like to imply. Apple was looking for ways to overcome their horrible disadvantage in processor technology and they were researching MP interconnects. They eventually abandoned Firewire but Sony found a need in their new DV standard. Sony wanted peer connectivity because editing was largely done outside of computing in those days. Firewire was never envisioned as a high speed serial IO connect, it just lucked into it.
Your 15 year old computer has a better processor than a 12 core Intel Xeon, better memory than registered, ECC 1866 MHz RAM and better external connectors than 6 Thunderbolt (20 Gbs) ports? Really? I have to see this computer.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Apple is the king of put what you don't need into computers. Unless your doing intensive video editing or mass virtualization, you simple don't need the bandwidth that is given from PCIe flash. A standard SSD over a Sata 3 interface is more then fast enough for 97% of general computer users. I would really like to hear the actual reason, beside price increase, that Apple can give as to why anyone needs this. How about they put the Ethernet port back on the notebook, they include more USB ports and a solid optical drive. The next thing Apple is going to include is a 10GB Fibre interface, because they can and it looks / sounds cool.
apple wasn't visionary because they used USB, they were visionary because they phased out the old stuff and made USB mandatory. that was the visionary part and it took some guts. you cannot disagree or deny that.
So you are bragging that you have a lowly file server that has more storage han Apple's workstation for creative professionals that is not marketed or designed to be a file server and Apple hasn't disclosed how much storage it will have. Also you have placed so much value this useless metric of more storage while the Mac Pro can easily crush your lowly file server in practically everything else. As for ThunderBolt, are you telling me that your 15 year old computer can do internal transfers faster than external 20Gbs ThunderBolt? Not bloodly likely. As for upgrading your graphics card, do you think you can beat two FirePro GPUs? Do you even have PCIe in your 15 year old computer or is it still AGP or legacy PCI. At best you're full of it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Well except that some of us have been using PCIe flash for years. It's not an apple invention.
Why Apple is taking credit for this new trend? Sony new Vaio Pro line has optional 20Gbps PCIe 256/512GB flash storage. I pre ordered one(first vaio in 9 years) simply because of that. Credit where it's due.
In 10 years no company will be manufacturing spinning hard drives.
...or horses.
I'm not sure if that's entirely true since firewire needs a bit more electronics than the downright dumb in comparison USB electronics that didn't need to do anything near as much. Firewire was designed to sustain a rate with multiple things on the same port while USB is just about shovelling the bits down the wire whenever it can. In the end firewire costs more (with or without royalties) and USB could get most tasks done. The niches where firewire was the only sane choice of the two, streaming from camcorder tape or to optical media burners without a buffer, have almost completely vanished leaving USB as good enough.
Apple was visionary because they got USB to work as promised/designed.
Back then, it was about 50/50 whether you could hot-plug a USB device into a Windows machine and have it not crash. Famously demonstrated by Bill Gates at a trade show. There's video. Look it up.
The Mac was also the first computer to allow you to plug in the maximum number of USB devices (128) without crashing. It took Windows a while to get there too.
Reeses
Heck, in this thread even. SSDs are all more than fast enough for today's usage on desktops. They aren't the bottleneck. With the lower latency, and good random access, they all seem to work well.
There's a difference between synthetic benchmarks and what you notice on the wall clock, and just because it is faster doesn't mean it is needed. Another area you see it is RAM. DDR3 scales up to 2133MHz by the spec, and you can find stuff of to 3000MHz. The Sandy/Ivy bridge controllers support RAM speeds async with the CPU bus, so it can scale up. When you drop a synthetic RAM speed test on it, you see the results. The faster RAM scales nearly linearly, as you'd expect. However then you test actual computation, including synthetic CPU benchmarks, and the difference vanishes. Anything past 1600MHz makes essentially no difference and even 1333MHz->1600MHz isn't that big. The RAM speed just isn't the limiting factor on the CPU.
That's what people need to understand about any data access kind of benchmark: There is such thing as enough. Once whatever processing you are doing isn't limited by it, more doesn't help. Now as processing speed increases, so can bandwidth requirements, but at a given level, you can hit "enough".
SSDs really are that point (past it really) for desktop tasks. You just don't wait on them. They can get data as fast as is needed, if there's any waiting it is on other things.
So while I don't hate on faster SSDs, I don't care either. I've played with RAIDing them, I've used fast and slow ones, none of it matters in terms of how long it takes for things to happen, or my ability to work in parallel. SSDs are just faster than I require.
Now this is not true in all applications, you can find server setups (NAS, DB, VM, that kind of thing) where indeed an SSD might not be fast enough and you need more than one ganged together, or you need them on a faster interface like PCIe or maybe FC.
Even then, SAS is advancing. HGST has 12G SAS SSDs on the market, and that'll get you 1.2GB/s of throughput, and do on in a hot-pluggable, RAID-able, setup and with more drives. There are reasons to want to hang drives off of a storage bus rather than right on the system bus.
The new Mac Pro isn't that great -- and I've been waiting for it. Really had my hopes up.
Flash drives seem to be characterized by very high failure rates. Changing the drive? Unclear this is a user operation. All real drives -- the ones you use for your data -- would have to be external bricks. Whereas standard HD's for the current design go in and out trivially. It's wonderful. Four of 'em.
External drives? External graphics? (3 display max it would seem unless you have external boxes.... yech) Nah.
Best thing right now seems to be the last generation of the big box. 12 cores, 12 more semi-competent hyperthreads, holds four drives, can push six monitors, RAM is (user!) upgradable...
And they finally fixed OSX so it handles multiple monitors correctly, fixed the broken menu paradigm, fixed how full screen apps work... perfect.
The mac pro.... unless there are some real differences between what they say they're making and what they actually make, I think it's the big box for me. My older 8-core can live in the ham shack doing SDR and digi-mode duty. :)
This way I know I can do the big jobs, and without littering my workspace, which I am quite particular about, with bricks and cables. I *really* don't understand what they were thinking.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Changing the drive? Unclear this is a user operation
Changing everything seems to be a user operation, it's as easy to get in this new box as the old
External drives? External graphics?
Thunderbolt? Which even allows for external GPU expansion...
3 display max it would seem
It's not three displays, it's up to three *4K" displays (4096 x 2160). Where you really driving six displays of that resolution before? You could drive more displays with lower resolution.
Basically it seems like you didn't bother to even read the specs for even a moment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If by visionary, you mean annoying then sure.
I knew a few people with early gen iMacs, and they all bought external USB floppy drives, because the world was still on floppies.
Everyone knows tech advances and old stuff goes away (they were 3.5" floppies not 5.25 or 8 after all). It's not particularly revolutionary to remove obsolete stuff and people do that all the time.
It's also not especially revoloutionary to remove stuff which is slowly moving into obsolescence early especially when it makes the resulting product much worse.
So, yes, I do strongly disagree that removing the floppy drive was visionary. It was quite clear the floppy drive was going: at that time, Zip was becoming successful because the floppy was getting too small and seeing an obvious truth is simply not visionary. It was also, as I mention, really irritating.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You mean the exact group that purchases Mac Pros? What are you thinking about!? This isn't a consumer machine.
apple wasn't visionary because they used USB, they were visionary because they phased out the old stuff and made USB mandatory. that was the visionary part and it took some guts. you cannot disagree or deny that.
Folks who prefer Apple's computing appliances have — and will continue to — pay top dollar for iToys regardless of what they lack or how they're assembled: glued-in batteries, soldered-in RAM, tamper-resistant fasteners, missing SD slots, all the proprietary technologies you want — Joe Sixpack eats that shit up. Upgrades are no problem — Apple's happy to sell 'em all new shit. I suspect that eliminating legacy interfaces wasn't so much "guts" as it was a marketing strategy.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
I compile large projects on a regular basis. We have one machine with 12 cores (24 threads) 256GB of RAM, so I tried running builds entirely to and from a RAM drive. The speed difference between that and using a mid-range SSD was too small to measure (-j12 up to -j64). The difference in performance between an SSD and a RAM drive is significantly greater than the difference between any two SSDs. In contrast, the difference between using a hard disk and an SSD is easily a factor of 2 in terms of build speed and often more.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
At the time they did it you could easily go all-USB on a PC as well, but few manufacturers offered legacy free motherboards because customers wanted to keep using their old PS2 mouse. My new mobo from last year still has a single PS2 port which my 10+ year old Samsung optical mouse is plugged in to.
Apple sell complete systems with a keyboard and mouse and are willing to screw consumers on backwards compatibility with their peripherals. Parallel port printer? Too bad, buy a new one. Serial port modem? Too bad, my a terrible USB one. That's not innovation, it was just marketed as such in the same way that MS is trying to market the XB One restrictions as good for consumers, only Apple is better at it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No, no you couldn't, and you certainly couldn't do both of these things at once. Thunderbolt 2 is still inadequate for connecting a GPU, it will not keep up with modern graphics cards. Not surprised to see you of all people get this wrong.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For server use you're right to worry about the write lifecycle of flash, but you're also right that they have pretty much cracked the problem.
Most user desktop and laptop machines are low write environments. Most bulk storage is a low write environment. The pictures I took last week were written once and won't be written again, but they may be viewed many times.
From a life cycle perspective this gives flash a huge advantage. For instance, a percentage of HDD's fail due to bearing issues. The time until the bearing fails is the same if there are 0 writes or continuous writes. How many people here would trust a 10 year old HDD? I'm betting not many. The bearings and the servos are quite likely to have issues. Continuous use is hard on them. Sitting on the shelf for that long is hard on them.
A 10 year old SSD that's been in a low write environment? No problem! A 20 year old SSD in a low write environment? No problem! Leave it on the shelf for 10 of those years (properly stored, in an anti-static bag and proper environmental), no problem!
So does USB...and serial for that matter. Whether one would want to is another matter. Thunderbolt is a small fraction of native x16 speeds
Apparently someone else who knows more than you thinks it's a good idea.
Could have saved yourself a lot of embarrassment there with a bit of Google work.
Where is your evidence of this?
That it's three 4K displays? My "evidence" is the Apple Mac Pro specs page which says exactly that.
Name one system EVER where you could subtract pixels from one display and magically be allowed to connect another.
You may want to read up on the meaning of the word BANDWIDTH. In fact the total amount of bandwidth dictates the number of displays you can attach via thunderbolt, you can have more displays withe lower resolution. You seriously do not understand how that is possible?
Those aren't specs, it's an ad
It's an ad, with some specs. I see the problem though, it's not that you can't read, it's that you lack the technical depth and understanding of newer technologies to understand what is going on.
I'll let you have the last response since there's no way you can learn enough to write an intelligent reply before the story is locked.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley