Samsung Unveils First PCIe 3.0 x4-Based M.2 SSD, Delivering Speeds of Over 2GB/s

Deathspawner writes: Samsung's SM951 is an unassuming gumstick SSD — it has no skulls or other bling — but it's what's underneath that counts: PCIe 3.0 x4 support. With that support, Samsung is able to boast speeds of 2,150MB/s read and 1,550MB/s write. But with such speeds comes an all-too-common caveat: you'll probably have to upgrade your computer to take true advantage of it. For comparison, Samsung says a Gen 2 PCIe x4 slot will limit the SM951 to just 1,600MB/s and 1,350MB/s (or 130K/100K IOPS), respectively. Perhaps now is a bad time to point out a typical Z97 motherboard only has a PCIe 2nd Gen x2 (yes, x2) connection to its M.2 slot, meaning one would need to halve those figures again.

Comments

Re:If you don't want to upgrade your box

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You should RARELY do this. If you go back and forth from other tasks where you can expect the cache to be re-used and need the absolutely best performance when you come back to those files, then something like this is a good idea. You're essentially committing content to RAM for cases where you know better than your operating system's optimizations.

Re:If you don't want to upgrade your box

[jbolden]

Have you ever gone to developer conferences, notice the number macs? Me thinks maybe you might want to check your assumptions. For example my mac is really easy to service. I buy a warranty and if something goes wrong the Apple store fixes it for free, quite often same day. Can't get much easier to service than that.

Re:If you don't want to upgrade your box

[ledow]

Last time I used a RAM drive, it was on the contents a floppy disk. My brother was sick of slow compile times and worked out how to use the university DOS computers to produce a RAM drive. Autoexec.bat created it and copied his files into it, and then it ran like greased lightning.

But that was back when 1.44Mb of RAM was a lot and he was lucky enough to be somewhere where every computer had that spare.

Last time I saw it when when making a single-floppy Linux distribution that copied itself into RAM because it was often used on diskless workstations. Just like almost every Ubuntu install disk can do now if you select Live CD from the boot menu.

But on ordinary desktop OS? Since Windows 95, RAMDisks have been dead. Since then, we've been using RAM better to cache all recent filesystem accesses. There's very, very, very, very little that will ever benefit from a RAMDisk over just having that RAM as filesystem cache automatically anyway. You still have to read the data from permanent storage anyway, and once you've done that, it's in RAM until you start to fill up RAM. Read it often enough and it will never drop out of the cache. If you're not reading it often enough, why the hell bother to RAMDisk it?

And you lose NOTHING if the machine dies mid-way. With a RAMDisk, any changes you make are gone.

Please. Stop spreading absolute "gold-plated-oxygen-free" junk advice like this.

Anyone who wants to do this can do it with any bit of freeware on any machine. But why they would bother is beyond me. Hell, next you'll be telling me to enable swapfiles and put them on the RAMDisk....

Re:Starts to get reasonable

[Lunix Nutcase]

There's nothing unfortunate about it. Access times for SSD is around .1 ms vs at worst around 15 nanoseconds for DDR3 RAM. You do realize how significant of a performance impact that would be, right?

Re:PCIe 3.0 availability

[Kjella]

With the new Haswell-E processors, the CPU has 40 lanes of PCIe x4. So on a lot of high end x99 motherboards you'll see four PCIe gen3 x16 slots. However, since the CPU only has 40 lanes, this means not all of those "x16" slots are truely using 16 lanes of PCIe. Normally when four cards are plugged in, you'll get slot 0 running at x16, and the other three slots running at x8.

That's not really correct, high end motherboards usually have PLX chips which act like PCIe switches. Like the motherboard the GP listed runs at 16x/16x/16x/16x (or 16x/8x/8x/8x/8x/8x/8x) and only the total is limited to 40.

Re:If you don't want to upgrade your box

[guruevi]

There exists no PC that costs $300 that will match up to a $2k Mac. Even if you plunk down $700 for a Mac Mini with AppleCare, it will be hard to find a similar machine with a similar service contract (think Dell Gold Service Contract).

Apple will come to you within 24h or ship you a new machine overnight but even after the warranty expires you can still call them and they will answer you. I have dealt with Dell, HP and Lenovo, it doesn't even come close.