Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “PCIe Gen5 Drives are Here! Are they Worth It??”.
This is speed: Gen 4, more, like Jen, snore, gen 5.. I feel alive. This pcie Gen 5 SSD May well be the fastest m.2 drive on the planet over 12 gigabytes, a second that is so fast. You could move your Warzone install in about five seconds and even if you’re, more into playing games than copy pasting them around with direct storage compatible titles. Finally, hitting the market Gamers might have a reason to add storage speed to their list of specs. That actually matter.
Let’S see what this thing can do. Wait a minute. 69 megabytes a second, that’s, not nice! That’S not nice at all! Just like it’s not nice to make you wait and find out what’s going on after this message from our sponsor thanks to the ridge for sponsoring this video made with premium quality materials, the ridge wallet is the perfect excuse to get rid of that old bulky wallet.
It’S not good. The ridge anniversary sale is happening now until March 24th, check them out the link below and use code Linus to save 10 off your purchase and get free shipping. Before we get into the inconvenient details. Let’S talk about what makes the crucial t700 a hair among tortoises a star among planets, a diamond among roughs.
It starts with the interface while this may look exactly like the kind of m.2 drive that you would install in your PC and in fact you could. Since it’s fully backwards compatible when paired with a pcie, Gen, 5 capable CPU and motherboard, it goes from a theoretical maximum of 7.9 gigabytes, a second to nearly 16 gigabytes, a second but Linus. You might say even your best case scenario demo.
You did had it anywhere from 11 to 12 gigabytes, a second uh. Well, yes, while the interface itself can hit the speeds. I just said this is our big but wait. There’S less moment you see there’s more than one factor that affects the real world performance of an SSD, and the interface is one of them, but another is the controller, and our t700 here has a doozy of a controller. The new fizen e26 is an eight channel controller that can easily handle drives with four terabytes of capacity at speeds of up to 14 gigabytes per second, that is nearly double the speed of their end game.
Gen, 4 controller. I know 14 gigabytes. A second is also not 12, but you’re, forgetting the third major factor that affects SSD performance, The nand Flash that actually stores the data, and this is the hardest part to scale honestly. The fact that this thing is as fast as it is is a modern Miracle.
The t700 uses micron’s latest 232 layer, TLC nand at 2, 000 Mega transfers per second to deliver the performance we saw up to 12 plus gigabytes per second of sequential reads, and about 11 gigabytes per second of sequential rights in both the 2 and 4 terabyte capacities. Now, curiously, it seems that by pushing the dies to their full rated 2400 Mega transfers per second, they could probably saturate the fize and e26 controller, but there are some reasons that they might not do that, starting with that, it probably wouldn’t affect anything behind me is Two identical ryzen 7950x bench, PCS, courtesy of our lab on the left. We’Ve got the Samsung 990 Pro, probably the fastest Gen 4 SSD on the market. If you ignore the firmware issues on the right, we’ve got the t700 Gen 5 baby uh time for our Crystal dismark drag race. Let’S go okay! Your your team, your team. Last year, gen gen, four gen, four wait how many of these t700 tradition versus modernity? This is great all right. We ready yeah, let’s go, let’s go. Let’S go, didn’t even count in what why I went okay, it was already around now yeah. I want to win. What can I say? Oh, look at this see you later buddy how’s, my rearview mirror treating you. Oh my God. This is brutal, literally more than double double the performance we’re back to sequentials boom.
Let’S go right. Speed baby, particularly those lower Q, depth sequentials, just crushing the Gen 4 Drive. Uh, that’s my first L. If you look closely you’ll notice, the weak improvements in random reads and random writes, which funnily enough is the category of Drive activity that represents typical day-to-day use, and it’s also where most drives struggle.
Why is that so slow? Well, here’s the thing writing to an SSD is kind of like boarding an airplane. Each row is a block and if you want to add a person to a row well first, you need to pull everyone out of that row, so the new person can get in then everyone has to sit back down. This takes time with sequential rights. People ready to be seated together in convenient groups of three. You can fill several rows or blocks quickly, but with random rights.
You’Ve got different people, trickling in and out of different sections at different times, and they all got to squeeze into the various random open seats. On the plane, sequential rights are also slowed down when there are people already sitting in a row. But when there’s some down time, the flight attendants are running the trim function where they move people who have been seated in their own rows into rows with other people.
So that when an influx of new passengers come along, we don’t have to worry as much about doing the awkward seat dance when those random rights do happen, though boy does it ever suck. Here we go Adam. Let’S go oh we’re doing.
What are we doing now? We want we are opening some programs. Oh, let’s see, let’s open some programs; okay, so we should close steam, let’s close steam. Well, no! No yeah, launch Team; okay, three two one go: okay! That was this same same. Even the ads lived at the same uh uh uh Edge, three two one go um, maybe something heavier uh like a game, maybe closed Edge. Okay, PC, Mark’s kind of a dog yeah open up PC mark one.
Two three go: oh whoa! That was a pretty big win. Actually significant yeah, okay, but can we repeat it three two one go uh uh, okay, now on the subject of PC mark it did in the storage Benchmark, show a solid win for the new drive with the t700 leading by about 16, but in less good news. When we fired up for spoken, which at this point is our only PC showcase for direct storage um, it was just plain couldn’t tell the difference, that’s not to say we couldn’t measure the difference. We were looking at about a five percent Advantage for our Gen 5 SSD, but there was no difference in actual frame rate and that five percent was just not something we could actually notice.
In Final Fantasy end Walker. We did see a 14 Improvement in load times, which is cool, but it’s a far cry from the 40 Improvement that these drives showed in synthetic benchmarks like Crystal disk marks. You know what maybe we should just do a big file transfer in Windows. I mean we say it all the time you know these sequential drives at least they’re good for big file transfers. Let’S do some big files, all right yeah.
This is going to go really fast, probably so, six gigabytes, a second five gigabytes, a second four and a half gigabytes. A second I mean that’s pretty fast, 4.2 gigabytes a second, but that’s that’s really fast, maybe the fastest I’ve ever seen. We seem to have hit some sort of file explorer or bottleneck here at about four gigabytes, a second but here’s the thing, even if Windows Explorer didn’t come up against its own software limitations. When performance is this fast, it can only last for so long running.
Our new drives in iometer free of Windows, File, Explorer we’ve slammed them for 15 minutes of continuous activity and saw our speeds fall precipitously in less than a minute down to about three gigabytes. A second what’s going on here, you might ask: is it thermal throttling? The answer is no, with either the heatsink on the drive or the integrated heat spreader on your motherboard. These drives stay well within their thermal limits.
What did happen, though, is we overwhelmed the cash on our Drive? Pretty much all modern drives store more than one bit per cell, which gives them more capacity but comes at the cost of performance and Longevity. But here’s the thing many drives, especially performance ones, can operate that multi-bit per cell nand in a kind of pseudo SLC mode. So it’s kind of like switching over a segment of the storage to go much faster, but at the cost of capacity once the drive has filled up that low capacity cache.
It starts running at much slower, TLC Nan speeds, then, when that is nearly full, we move to what’s called a folding state where the drive runs at a distinctly unimpressive one to one and a half gigabytes per second. Basically, it’s bottlenecked by being forced to rearrange data on the Fly while it’s operating rather than being allowed to perform these operations. In the background, while you aren’t using it which, if you remember from our airplane analogy, is pretty inefficient.
Lo and behold, the 990 Pro suffers. The exact same fate, even coming in at similar sustained numbers, wait a second that’s because, despite the impressively dense new nand on the t700, it’s not actually faster than the nand flash from Top tier Gen 4 drives like the 990 Pro bummer. To be clear. This only happens when you’re moving incredibly large files, and it doesn’t reflect typical use most of the time you’re doing those random reads and writes that can easily be handled by the high speed cache, which is actually an even bigger problem for the marketing teams, who are Tasked with selling these drives, if the sequential numbers aren’t sustainable and the Gen 5 interface is ludicrously overkill for the more random workloads that we encounter on a daily basis. What is the point of this thing? Okay, it’s possible that you’re a power user with numerous virtual machines or Docker containers. You could have some use for this, but honestly, I think even that is kind of missing the point of what makes pcie Gen 5 drives so exciting.
The real, exciting part is not necessarily this drive, or even the current pcie gen 5 crop of platforms, but rather The increased expansion that could be available to us in the future. Thanks to gen 5’s, faster per Lane data rates, we could in theory get the same performance from our drives as last gen or gpus, or network cards using half. As many lanes like think about a ryzen 5000 system, you got your GPU that 16 lanes you’ve got your single m.2 storage drive, that’s another four and then you’re sitting there going. I need more storage.
Why don’t? I add a second m.2 Drive? Well, when you go to add that second Drive instead of running off the pcie lanes that are directly wired into the CPU you’re, going to be running off lanes that are going through the motherboard chipset, which is fine but the more drives. You want to add. The more potential there’s going to be for bottlenecks unless you want to fall back to slower SATA drives now workstation class CPUs do exist with much greater pcie connectivity, but they’re also significantly more expensive, with pcie Gen 5. On the other hand, well we get double the performance with the same number of lanes or the same performance using half as many lanes. So suddenly, you could have two drives out of more than ample eight gigabytes, a second with nice, low, latency connections directly to the CPU. Personally, I’d actually like to see us go all the way down to a single Lane, Drive at four gigabytes a second and then I could have four of them sick now, in practice, it’s not that simple! Nothing ever is but think about it.
This could be a very interesting path for the industry to follow and in fact, we’re already seeing it in the server space. Now you might be wondering why not just make more Lanes instead of trying to make the lanes faster well, the thing is that more Lanes means more pins, are needed to connect them and more pins means more complexity and more complexity means higher costs. So, while I’m a little disappointed to find out that there is no clear benefit to this thing, for the average gamer hey at least, we can have fun with them right, see big numbers uh. Why don’t we raid zero? These drives see how fast they go? Hey hey raid: zero is a valid configuration David. Oh my God, are you actually using Windows Drive manager to really use storage space? Just do it. I don’t care.
We just got to get this guy in here. This is ridiculous. Well, there’s two in here now yeah, but you can’t do one that you’re booted on we have to format it into a drive and then are these hot spots. Uh pcie is not hot chocolate.
Yes, it is. It is well not on consumer platforms, I’m shutting it down. How many of these can you fit in there in the tech, I thought you were gon na, ask how many I could fit in my butt. Oh, I was gon na ask about your Tech sack. Did you try this and it’s really fast? Yes, neat? Well, it failed when I tried to create it. So that’s cool um and just like if we were running a single Drive, um other bottlenecks would stop us before we’d get anywhere near this kind of performance.
In the real world, so as our testing is shown today, it’s not really the speed that matters at least not today. The real benefits of pcie Gen 5 are more about flexibility and I guess being ready for whatever the future might bring and whatever segue I might bring to our sponsor zoho1. Do you own or manage a business Zoho one can make your life easier. It takes the Essential Elements of any business such as accounting, marketing and HR, and combines them into one unified operating system, build your very own website from the ground up and maintain it with intuitive customization and personalization options send out purchase, orders, create marketing campaigns and manage Shift scheduling all in just a few clicks then track metrics and use that data to make key decisions to increase Revenue. It helps you help yourself again.
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If you guys enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy the honey badger Den, a truly fast SSD array that we actually do use in our editing day right over there yep that’s right. I mean it’s not in there it’s in the server room, but but they use it every day to not nearly its full potential. Just like this, oh crap, .