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Seagate Debuts World's Fastest NVMe SSD With 10GBps Throughput (hothardware.com)

Posted by timothy on from the faster-and-bigger dept.

MojoKid writes: Seagate has just unveiled what it is calling "the world's fastest SSD," and the performance differential between it and the next closest competitive offering is significant, if their claims are true. The SSD, which Seagate today announced is in "production-ready" form employs the NVMe protocol to help it achieve breakneck speeds. So just how fast is it? Seagate says that the new SSD is capable of 10GB/sec of throughput when used in 16-lane PCIe slots. Seagate notes that this is 4GB/sec faster than the next-fastest competing SSD solution. The company is also working on a second, lower-performing variant that works in 8-lane PCIe slots and has a throughput of 6.7GB/sec. Seagate sees the second model as a more cost-effect SSD for businesses that want a high performing SSD, but want to keep costs and power consumption under control. Seagate isn't ready yet to discuss pricing for its blazing fast SSDs, and oddly haven't disclosed a model name either, but it does say that general availability for its customers will open up during the summer.

12 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Inconceivable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Hard to grok. You can fill up that new Samsung 16TB drive in 2 min 40 sec.

  2. Re:Can anyone explain that speed in football field by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Imagine a 10GB picture of a football field. This SSD can transfer ONE of those pictures per second!

  3. Decisions decisions by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

    Crap. Now what to do here for my new PC build?

    Most motherboards with 2 or 3 x16 slots really only have all 16 lanes hooked into one slot - the others are usually 8 lanes or less - 16-8-4 iisn't even an uncommon configuration (PCIe tip - the slots are really just physical - you can put x16 slots even though it's hooked up to x1 so you can fit in any PCIe card, albeit only running at x1 speeds. It's why Apple's old Mac Pros used x16 slots - that way they can accept ANY PCIe card).

    So now what to do... GPU in x16 slot, and slow down my fast SSD by putting it in a x8? Or have my SSD be nice and fast by putting it in the x16 slot and slow down my FPS by putting the GPU in the s8 slot?

    Nevermind if you want to do SLI or CrossFire and now have to deal with 2 x16 GPUs and 1 x16 SSD...

    1. Re:Decisions decisions by Kokuyo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Dude, any GPU will do just fine at 8x. Or how do you think SLI would work otherwise? The beefiest gamerboards have 20 PCIe lanes max.

    2. Re:Decisions decisions by threephaseboy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Intel boards with LGA 2011-3 sockets have 40 PCIe lanes available coming off the CPU.

      --
      .
    3. Re:Decisions decisions by DRJlaw · · Score: 4, Informative

      So now what to do... GPU in x16 slot, and slow down my fast SSD by putting it in a x8? Or have my SSD be nice and fast by putting it in the x16 slot and slow down my FPS by putting the GPU in the s8 slot?

      Simply, no.

      You are right about the physical PCIe slot connectors.

      You could be right about the physical PCIe slot wiring, but in many boards with two x16 slots (assuming that there are only two, with the chipset-wired slots not being physically x16) both are electrically wired to be x16. You do not have to put a card in a specific one of the two slots to have an operational x16 connection.

      You are wrong about the functional connections. I'll assume an Intel-compantible motherboard since that is what I'm familiar with. AMD-compatible motherboards could be different - I simply do not know.

      Intel CPUs provide 16 PCIe lanes for connection to the x16 slot(s). If you have one card inserted, that slot will be allocated all 16 lanes. If you have two cards inserted in a board providing two slots, each slot will be allocated 8 lanes. In Z170 boards there could be three CPU-connected slots, and with three cards inserted in such a board, the slots would be allocated x8/x4/x4. See here.

      Everything else runs off chipset-provided PCIe lanes, which are connected to the CPU by a PCIe x4-like . Thus, for example, in my Ivy Bridge system (Z68), there is a third PCIe x16 physical slot that is PCIe x4 electrically wired and functionally PCIe x1-connected unless I set a BIOS option that disables certain other peripherals (USB3 and eSATA add-ons).

      If you connect your GPU and this SSD at the same time, you will be either x8/x8 (if using CPU-connected slots) or x16/x4 (if using one CPU-connected slot and one chipset-connected slot). That x4 would also be shared with every other I/O connection in the system due to the DMI "x4" like bandwidth limitation.

      PCIe PLXs switches add lanes to slots, but do not add further connections to the CPU or chipset. At the end of the day you're sharing either the 16 CPU-provided lanes or the 4 chipset provided lanes in Intel's consumer-oriented boards. You have to go to the LGA2011 socket and workstation chipsets to gain more available bandwidth to the CPU.

    4. Re:Decisions decisions by pjrc · · Score: 2

      If you can afford this "enterprise" SSD, you can certainly afford a Xeon or Haswell-E and LGA2011 motherboard with 40 PCIe lanes.

      --
      PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
  4. Re:Can anyone explain that speed in football field by orledrat · · Score: 2

    TFA clearly states that it is damn fast:

    The company is also working on a second, lower-performing variant that works in 8-lane PCIe slots and has a throughput of 6.7GB/sec (which is still damn fast).

    Crucially, does anyone know whether I can safely use this with my "System D" system? It molested my cat last month, twice, so I want to make sure all is safe before slotting this sucker in.

  5. We advertising, bragging..but... by evolutionary · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We have no model number, no pricing, and no precise release date. Sounds like these tests are preliminary. Sounds like "beta" to me. I've been the the victim of an entire batch of enterprise drives which had experimental firmware (which actually shut down the drives at specific date!) so I'd take this announcement as market priming and take it was a grain of salt.

    --
    "Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
  6. Re:Can anyone explain that speed in football field by orledrat · · Score: 2

    TFA clearly states that it is damn fast:

    Do note that "damn fast" is NOT equal to "ramadan fast".

    There's differences: it takes less long than ramadan fast, to start with, and the cache-miss penalty is less severe per byte.

  7. Re:Can anyone explain that speed in football field by NotDrWho · · Score: 2

    Is that an Imperial or metric fortnight?

    --
    SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
  8. Re:Transfer rates not bottleneck by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

    You will see zero benefit when booting pc and running standard programs. What really drives speed is IOPS and cpu (after mechanical disks and value ssds are gone). Tomshardware did a benchmark with raid 0 ssds vs standard ssds back in 2013.

    They booted slower than non raid. Game loading speed didn't make a different either. BUT winzip and transfering a large 2 gig files where crazy fast.

    So a server would benefit maybe but I doubt most have 10 gbs ethernet to come close. So unless you work on databases (those are IOPS, not bandwidth) but even then an enterprise SSD in raid 5 with several disks would approach the speed for queries even if the bandwidth is not as great. These are niches.

    So if I were you unless you make 6 figures I would not invest. I would get a nice Samsung pro 850 SSD or raid 0 them for 1/3 the price. You wouldn't notice the difference at all

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    http://saveie6.com/