Episode: 3572
Title: HPR3572: More about NVMe
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3572/hpr3572.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 01:35:49

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3572 for Tuesday the 12th of April 2022.
Today's show is entitled, More About Noon.
It is hosted by JWP and is about 19 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, who what when and where of no?
Good day everyone.
I wanted to continue with some more information about M-V-E-M-E, SSDs, everything you might
want to know about the storage, which is insanely fast.
For those of you that don't know, there's a new wave of memory-based storage and it blows
the older generations away.
So the good news is that you can pretty cheaply get it in your PC.
It looks pretty much like the normal M2 thing that you've normally already had, okay?
So M-V-M-E is no longer a nice to have storage technology.
If you're shopping for a new PC, it's a feature that you should actively seek out.
Moreover, if your PC is of a fairly vintage variety, you should upgrade to VME and here's
why.
VME is a communication standard developed for SSDs by a consortium of vendors, including
Intel, Samsung, Sandisk, Dell, and Seagate.
It operates across the PCI bus, hence the Express in the name, which allows drives to act
more like fast memory than they are, rather than hard disk, they imitate.
The bottom line is M-V-M-E is fast, really fast.
Like never have to wait again for your computer fast.
And removing what it does is removes storage as a bottleneck, not to belittle the efforts
of the CPU and GPU vendors over the last decade.
But the reason the latest top NPCs seem so much faster is because there's been a quantum
leap in storage performance provided by SSDs, first with SATA, and now over M-V-M-E.
The storage bottleneck was the last bottleneck for the real and perceived performance.
But now it's widely widespread with the vengeance.
If you bought a PC, say a MacBook Pro in the last two years, you may have noticed that
you could hardly wait at all anymore for mundane operations.
Programs pop open, files load, save an instant, and the machine boots it just down in just
a few seconds.
That's because M-V-M-E SSD inside the MacBook Pro reads and writes the data literally
four times faster than SATA SSDs found in previous generations, not only that, but it
locates them 10 times as fast on the Seek.
That's on top of a four to five-fold improvement in throughput and a 10-fold improvement in
Seek times that was already provided by normal SATA SSDs compared to old hard drives.
The approximate performance ceiling for three main storage technologies as they now
stand.
So if you have a SATA drive, you're looking at less than 500 M-Capital M-B, little P-S
per second.
If you have an SSD, it's normal SATA SSD, you're looking at right around 500 M-BPS, so
I think that's megabits per second.
If you have an M-V-M-E SSD, you're looking at really close 2,800 or 2,900, really close
to 3,000 M-BPS, and not that you can need to stay in throughput like this very often,
but M-V-M-E makes short work of transferring files of any size.
And H-D is 200 M-B-S typically, and SATA SSD is 550 M-B-S, while the M-V-M-E is over
three gigabytes per PS.
Longer bars are better in all of this, okay?
And the Seek time, so let's talk about the Seek time.
So the Seek time, again, the longer bars are better, and so the Seek time is two milliseconds,
two milliseconds, and whereas the standard SSD is less than 0.2, and the hard drive is like
0.000 or something.
So the CPU development curve of Pales in comparison, the CPU and GPU curve of Pales in comparison
with storage over the last 10 years, H-D is about two to five milliseconds Seek, and
SATA SSD is 0.2 milliseconds, and the M-V-E is 0.02 milliseconds on your Seek.
So the shorter the bars, the better, the better, but this is the overall average.
Some drives in each category might do better and some will do worse, but still, it's really
amazing.
Hard drives still offer tremendous bake, you're bang for the bulk in terms of capacities,
and are wonderful for less use data, but for your operating systems, programs, and off-use
data, you want an M-V-M-E SSD in your system, if your system reports it, or a SATA SSD if
it can't.
So SATA SSDs versus M-V-M-E SSDs, knowing well the ultimate performance of NAND-based SSDs
even when they first showed up, it was clear the industry that new bus and protocol would
eventually be needed, but as the first SSDs were relatively slow and bulky, it provided
a far more convenient to use the existing SATA storage infrastructure.
Though the SATA bus was developed to 16GB per second as of version 3.3, nearly all the
commercial implementations remain 6GPS, roughly 550 BPMAS after communications overhead.
Even the 3.3 version is far slower than what today's SSD technology is capable, especially
in raid configurations.
So, for instance, the Sandisk Extreme Pro offers the exact same performance as the WD-Western
Digital Black M-V-E, because wait for it is the same drive.
The drive uses four PCI E-Lanes for three reticle maximum throughput of well over three
gigabytes per second, but as a replacement for the SATA bus, it was decided to leverage
a much higher bandwidth technology, thus that was also already in place.
The PCIe Express or PCIe is the underlying data transport layer for graphics and other
adding cards.
As of generation 3X, it offers multiple lengths of the 16 for use with any one device and
most PCs that will handle darn near a gigabyte per second, each or 985 MBPS.
So the PCIe also is the foundation for the Thunderbolt interface, which starting to pay dividends
with external graphics cards for gaming, as well as external NVMe storage, which is nearly
as fast as the internal NVMe.
Intel's refusal to let Thunderbolt die was a very good thing, as many users are starting
to discover.
Even though Intel has shared the technology with the USB form to make it easier to implement,
it's still rarer than one might hope.
Of course, for PCIe storage, predates VME by quite a few years, but previous solutions
were hamstrung by older data transfer protocols such as SATA, SCSI, and AHDI, which all developed
when hard drive was still at the apex of storage technology.
So the old hard drive isn't at the apex anymore.
And the NVMe removes their constraints by offering lower latency commands and multiple
cues of up to 64K of them.
The latter is particularly effective because data is written to SSDs and shotgun faction,
scatter about the chips and blocks rather than continuously encircles is on hard drive.
The NVMe standard has continued to involve to the persistent version of 1.31.
And with the addition of such features such as the ability to use part of your computer
system as cache, we've already seen that caching employed by Supercheap Toshiba RC100,
which foregoes onboard RAM cache that most NVMe dices use, but still performs well enough
to give your system the NVMe kick in the pants for everyday chores.
So what do you need to get NVMe?
It's obviously, if it's obviously, oh no, it's obviously best if your system already
supports NVMe and has an M2 slot that is still possible to add a NV drive to any PC with
the PCI slot via a $25 adapter card.
All recent versions of the major operating system provide drivers regardless of the age
of the system.
And you will have a very fast drive on your hands, but there's a catch.
To benefit fully from an NVMe SSD, you must be able to boot the operating system from
it.
And that requires be a support.
Oh no.
Most older mainstream dials do not support booting from NVMe and most likely never well.
There's simply no benefit to the vendors to add it.
And a very real downside is you're less likely to upgrade a system that's been updated
with NV unless you play PCM, PC games, or do something truly CPU intensive like editing
2160p or 4K or 8K video.
And so, like we said before, the M2 NVMe SSD, such as a readily to the affordable or
relatively affordable and very fast, except for extremely large transfers, things like
the Samsung 970 EVO can live in a M2-2 PCIe slot or in a regular PCIe slot 4X greater
by the means of a cheap adapter card.
All the NVMe SSDs sold in the consumer space used in an M2 form factor.
Though there are connectors below simply by having an M2 slot doesn't guarantee NVMe
competably.
M2 was designed to support USB-3O, SATA, and PCIe, and most clearly M2 slots supported
only SATA.
So read your system or motherboards, manufacturers, guide, or check online.
Note that M SATA slot, which was a v2, the M2, looks very similar and looks very similar.
So the M2, the M2 and the M SATA look really, really similar.
So be sure that you're really having an M2.
I know that there's a lot of old laptops out there.
So there's no way to tell if I'm looking at a slot, whether it supports PCIe and NVMe,
but you can tell the difference between a PCIe 2X and a PCIe 4X slot.
The former is called a B key, and the key is in the rise, which marries in the gap of
the contacts on the drive.
It has six contacts separated from the rest, while the latter, the M key has five contacts
separated from the rest on the opposite side.
There is no hard and fast rule, but many B slots were SATA only.
So if you have a B slash M key slot with both sets of contacts separated, most common
today, you're golden.
And these are also referred to as socket 2 and socket 3.
If your socket lets you down, it's time for a $25 PCIe M2 adapter card.
And one of the interesting ones is Plexter's MP9e, and others are available and readily
mounted in the PCIe cards and ready to rock as products.
So what can you as an end user?
So what you as an end user can avoid are two and a half inch NVMe drives.
These require a U2 and EDA, a SF 8639, a small four-practor connector, a U2 connection,
which is four Gen3 PCIe lines, two SATA ports, plus side band channels, and both are
3.3 volt and 12 volt power, but it's only found in enterprise-level storage systems.
So that's going to cost a lot of money.
On the all chance you're using the rare Windows PC that supports Thunderbolt, Mini with
A, if you have an Osu motherboard, they do, you may be able to use the external Thunderbolt
PCIe closure to add NVMe to your system.
This works like a charm on a Thunderbolt Mac, and it's new enough to run a hi-ser-era.
Okay, so not all NVMe drives are created equal.
While just about any NVMe should make your system feel quicker, they're all not alike,
not even close.
There are Samsung's 970 Pro, we'll read over three gigabytes per second and write it
two and a half gigabytes per second, the Choshiba RC100 reads at 1.2 gigabytes per second
and writes at 900 gigabytes per second.
The difference can be even greater when the amount of data exceeds the cash on board.
A number of factors affect performance, including the controller, amount of NAD on board, the
number of PCIe lanes, and the type of NAD, here are some rules of thumb, 4X PCI NVMe SSDs,
are faster than the 2X PCIe types.
More nan chips, the more nan chips you have, the more pass and destinations the controller
has to distribute and store the data at.
Other capacity versions, especially 128 gigabyte and 256 gigabyte, of the same model drive,
are quite often slower than larger complexity flavors.
And the NAD type, the type of NAD used matters.
SLC or single level cell, one bit is the fastest, MLC, multi level cell, two bit is the next,
TLC, triple level cell, three bit is slower.
And QLC, four bit is the slowest, however the formula is complicated, and by that fact
you can see, you can treat any type of NAD except SLC as faster than the processor, but
simply writing fewer bits.
Vinders do this with portions of the SSD for use as cash, which means TLC or QLC drive
can be just as fast as an SLC drive, until the cash is used up.
Most controllers these days are very effective, but some such as those used by Intel and
SAV2DISC are smarter about how they use the cash and can sustain right performance with
larger datasets.
Capacity matters.
It's nearly all NVMe SSDs use a portion of their NAD as secondary cash, Mini and Mini
use it as a primary cash as well.
There has to be a NAD available for that purpose.
IE, if you buy a terabyte SSD and put 900 Gb on it, there's going to be a lot less NAD
available for caching.
The performance will suffer, and our experience, once you reach 80% of the full mark, you'll
start to notice a difference.
Never mind that when you decide to buy and what size you divide, a good rule of thumb
is by double the capacity you might expect to need, remembering that stuff tends to expand
if the space is available.
NVMe means no regrets for a long time, okay?
That's right.
You won't have any regrets for a very long time.
If all that hasn't driven home to point, let's say again, NVMe is the storage technology
you want for your current or your next PC, unless you're a gamer or high resolution video
editor, it virtually guarantees that you won't need to replace your current system for
quite a while, at least because of performance.
Indeed, I felt zero compulsion to replace my 6 or 7 year old system since it was upgraded
with NVMe zero, so it really means that you don't need another PC, okay?
No, when you purchase, and that's really it, so if you do the upgrade at home, it's
absolutely fantastic, and you just add the card and hope that your BIOS supports booting
over NVMe, and if it does, well then, I mean, there's no reason to really have a new PC
unless you're really into gaming, all right, hey, take care, be safe, I'll talk to you
again soon, bye.
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