Samsung Debuts the 990 Pro Series SSD With Big Speed and Efficiency Improvements (engadget.com) 29
Samsung has unveiled its latest lineup of NVMe solid state drives, the 990 Pro series. The company claims the SSD will reach almost the highest speeds that are theoretically possible from the PCIe 4.0 interface (PCI 5.0 SSDs will be much faster). Samsung hopes to deliver better performance for PC and console games, 4K and 8K content and other heavy data use cases. From a report: The 990 Pro boasts sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,450 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s. The 980 Pro offers up to 7,000 MB/s and 5,100 MB/s read and write speeds. The 990 Pro's random read and write speeds are up to 1,400K and 1,550K input/output operations per second, according to Samsung. The company says that marks up to a 55 percent improvement over the 980 Pro's performance. Moreover, the company says the 990 Pro will be more power efficient than the previous lineup by up to 50 percent. The new SSD will go on sale in October at a starting price of $179 for the 1TB model.
Ahhh. Explains it (Score:1)
I'd noticed that SSD prices took a dive in the past week or so. I suspected Something Was Up.
Awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
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I think DDR4 is about 20 GB/s. That would make the speed difference less than an order of magnitude.
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Okay that page shows both 47.68 GB/s and 82.963 GB/s further down the page, the former may be the correct one.
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RAM speed is pretty much constant. SSD speed is always "up to".
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Also with SSDs the latency is higher. While you can read 7GB/sec sequentially, the time to read one byte at some random address is still significantly slower than RAM. That said, they have improved that aspect of it dramatically as well.
Re: Awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow you just made me remember the early 2000s when I got some crazy unobtainium DDR1 ram that was able to run at CAS 0.5 and overclocked to hell could still run CAS 1 with a 1:1 ratio which actually outperformed DDR2 speeds with CAS around 4.
Until DDR3 a very high quality DDR1 setup with the right dividers and ratios could outperform DDR2 if you got the right setup.
Man I feel old.
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Depends on the workload. DDR2 has far smaller access chunks and hence far more different accesses per second. For linear reads and writes, sure. But try to access a hash-table...
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7 GB/s is fast enough to blur the distinction between RAM and mass storage to some degree. Remember DDR2 RAM? It was slower than this. Granted that's almost 20 years ago, but still...
That is what they said about execute in place using NAND Flash. The latency difference between the fastest NAND Flash and DRAM would kill CPU performance. Nothing Samsung has done reduces latency.
OK but what's the write endurance like on those? (Score:3)
Being fast is fine and I realize we are not talking about enterprise hardware here, but if the speed is coming at a cost of dramatically reduced DWpD, it can stay far the fuck away from me. Reading 10% faster means a lot less to me than long term reliability.
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Being fast is fine and I realize we are not talking about enterprise hardware here, but if the speed is coming at a cost of dramatically reduced DWpD, it can stay far the fuck away from me. Reading 10% faster means a lot less to me than long term reliability.
Very good point. I found an article that mentioned the durability of the new drive, but it was only to say that it's unconfirmed at this point (6 days ago). [nascompares.com]
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I'm genuinely curious as to what you propose to do with your SSD where any drive on the market doesn't meet your endurance requirements. Are you using it on a database server? In that case it may be a poor choice. Even a typical power user won't hit the endurance limit of any consumer SSD before most of their computer has failed for various other reasons.
Eh, so what. (Score:3, Insightful)
They're focused on the wrong things. At this point I wish they would focus on storage space and reliability over performance.
Even if it only did 500MB/s that would be fine if I could buy a 10TB drive for less than $200 and it would last more than 10 years under heavy use.
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The Pro series of Samsung SSDs are focused on reliability - they generally use more reliable NAND flash technologies and are far more solid devices. That said, the EVO line is generally for those who want a more economical platform as they give you more storage space for the dollar, but usually achieve it with cutting edge flash technology.
How much is enough? (Score:1)
Wrong direction (Score:5, Interesting)
Three year old 860 pro in my laptop has twice the write endurance of a 990 pro of the same size.
Reliability has far more value to me than raw I/O numbers on benchmarks. Doubt very few would even be able to tell any difference in real world use at all.
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How many years would it take for you to wear out a 990 Pro?
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Three year old 860 pro in my laptop has twice the write endurance of a 990 pro of the same size.
Cool story. Now check what percentage of the endurance you've hit in those three years on your 860 pro. If it's anything below 70% then congratulations on being concerned about irrelevant things.
Doubt very few would even be able to tell any difference in real world use at all.
This comment applies to the endurance figures, not the speed.
Re:Wrong direction (Score:5, Insightful)
Cool story. Now check what percentage of the endurance you've hit in those three years on your 860 pro. If it's anything below 70% then congratulations on being concerned about irrelevant things
If I reached 50% I would already be hitting the write limit of a 990 pro.
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I built my first SSD system last year and found that I was burning through 10% of the SSD endurance per month unless I rearranged things to use my RAID 10 for scratch space. The 5 year warranty on the SSD would have expired in 10 months, and that was *after* I selected a premium SSD for higher endurance.
Awkward timing (Score:2)
Why release a top-tier drive for PCIe 4.0 slots when PCIe 5.0 is right around the corner? There's a market for "old" tech, but releasing your top-tier consumer device (despite the "Pro" name) for PCIe 4.0 now seems silly.
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How many of those people are going to do an in-place storage upgrade?
Try writing it until it's full... (Score:4, Insightful)
Try actually writing to this SSD more than its cache(s) can take, only then you'll see the much much lower actual speed of permanent storage to the flash memory in it.
R.I.P. In Peace MCL (Score:2)
The 970 Pro was the last Samsung Pro drive with MLC. The 980 Pro and this one are TLC.
The 850 Pro was the last Samsung Pro with a 10 year warranty. Mine is still going strong and still under warranty until 2027.
Intel optane (Score:2)
How does this compare to that 3d XPoint tech called Optane from intel?