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

PCIe 3.0 availability

[RogueyWon]

It's curious how many relatively recent high-end PCs from prestige-brands don't have PCIe 3.0 slots. Alienware are a particular offender here - they were very slow adopters, quite possibly because a lot of their customers don't actually think to check for this when speccing up a machine.

That said, it's questionable how much it really matters in the real world at the moment. Performance tests on the latest video cards (which can take advantage of PCIe 3.0) have found very little performance gap between 3.0 and 2.0 (and even 1.0) with the likes of the Nvidia 980. The gap is most apparent at extremely high (150+) framerates - which is unlikely to constrain the average gamer, who probably just turns up the graphical settings until his PC can't sustain his target framerate (probably somewhere in the 40-60fps rate) any more.

If you don't want to upgrade your box

[azav]

Then max out the RAM and create a RAM drive.

On my 2010 iMac, I have a 16 GB RAM drive that gets between 3 and 4 GB/s and still have 16 GB of RAM available for my apps.

Check this terminal command out before entering it just to be safe.

diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'RAM Disk' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://33554432`

Under Mac OS 10.6.8, and 10.9 the above creates a 17 GB RAM disk.

diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'RAM Disk' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://8388608`

This creates a 4.27 GB RAM disk. Enjoy the speed.

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

[azav]

Well, shame on me. I've been doing it for 3 years on a daily basis.

I have my RAM drive rsynched to an SSD partition that is the same-ish size.

And here's one area where you're incorrect. Safari loads web pages. Each page loads javascript. Many of these leak over time or simply never purge their contents. I often end up with 8 GB used in Safari. Safari alone is a citizen that doesn't play by these rules because each page that loads is a prisoner of the javascript that loads and often doesn't handle memory freeing properly.

When I use my RAM as a drive, I get near INSTANT builds on OS X.

This matters to me more than your claims of "all modern operating systems taking full advantage of the RAM". If the operating system takes full advantage of the RAM, it may not be to my best benefit.

For example, Apple apps now by default do not quit when you close the last document. They merely stay in memory, hide the UI and then need to be relaunched to enable the UI again. Why does this matter? For TextEdit, if I want to open a document form the open menu if I close the last document and click elsewhere, this forces me to reopen the app because the OS fake closes the app (really only hiding the UI) while the rest of the app stays memory resident.

So, I have to relaunch the app. This takes more time and ONLY just renables the UI. How much memory does this save on my 32 GB machine? 1 MB. Now, that's certainly not taking full advantage of the RAM. It's a case of the OS designers thinking that "he wanted to quit the app, so we'll do it for him". But I didn't want to quit the app. The computer is not taking full advantage of the RAM in this case. That's not what I wanted it to do.

Maybe I have apps in the background that are doing stuff, but I want them to pause completely if another app is running in the foreground. Maybe I want ALL Safari pages to suspend their javascript when in the background, but the app still can still process downloads as if it's running at normal priority.

See, there are many cases where the computer's OS will not take proper advantage of the RAM and the processing power since it can not mirror the user's intentions. Even in cases where it tries to, it often gets them wrong. And in some cases where it does (Safari javascript), the computer ends up eating processing power and RAM for tasks that the user doesn't want it to be placing priority on. And in some of these cases, it can't allocate RAM and processing power properly, because it can't if it relies on other programmers writing their javascript competently and acting as good citizens.

I can cordon off a small chunk of my computer's RAM (since I have way more than enough) and direct it to do pretty damn much just want I want it to do.

That's why I bought it. I don't want the OS to prioritize things the way it wants to. I want to tell (parts of) the OS to prioritize things the way I want it to.

Cheers.