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PCIe 4.0 Card Hosts 21M.2 SSDs: Up To 168TB, 31 GB/s
- wdb 4y agoNice, I am currently in the jungle of SSD enclosures for my Apple M2 Pro device and it’s pretty confusing. But 31 GB/s seems wild.
- AceJohnny2 4y agoNote that a Thunderbolt 4 Hub can be a bottleneck: https://eclecticlight.co/2023/02/21/thunderbolt-4-hubs-can-slow-down-fast-ssds/ https://eclecticlight.co/2023/02/21/thunderbolt-4-hubs-can-s...
- formerly_proven 4y agoNote 32 Gb/s, not GB/s.
- phonon 4y agoNo, it's GB/s. PCIe 4.0 x16 has a bandwidth of 32 Gigabytes/s.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- manav 4y agoMight be able to eventually get 80Gbps out of USB4v2.
- vardump 4y agoSame issue here, found anything good?
- wdb 4y agoNot yet Orico seems pretty disappointing 600MB/s for their 20Gbps enclosures. I would thought you should already get that with their 10Gbps ones. So a bit wary to try out their 40Gbps enclosures.
- _joel 4y agoI'll take two please
- throitallaway 4y agoDoes anyone else marvel at data throughputs nowadays? People talk about 5GB/s NVME cards as being "slow." Same with Internet speeds. It's unreal the progress that we've made (and continue to make.)
- doubled112 4y agoAbsolutely. I keep saying to people "it doesn't matter, everything is fast now". Gigabit fibre to the home, NVMe that is way faster than RAM was not that long ago, CPUs in phones that make old desktops look like toasters. The disconnect is that the numbers feel huge in comparison, and what my computer can do for me really, is not hugely different.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago> NVMe that is way faster than RAM was not that long ago Citation?
- rektide 4y agoDDR2-1066 was pretty rare (fast), and rated as PC2-8500, meaning 8.5GBps. DDR3 started here-about, in ~2007. Consumer PCIe 5.0 ssds will in some cases likely surpass that.
- jakogut 4y agoDDR2-800 has a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 6,400 MB/s, and was in common use well after 2010.
- doubled112 4y agoDepends on what you consider a long time, maybe. https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-state-drives/990-pro-pcie-4-0-nvme-ssd-2tb-mz-v9p2t0b-am/ https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-st... > Sequential read/write speeds up to 7,450/6,900 MB/s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR2_SDRAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR2_SDRAM Lists DDR2-400 capable of 3200 MB/s of throughput.
- Havoc 4y agoReally hope they release a smaller version for home use. Something with say 8 slots would turn all those gen 4 pcie gaming motherboards retiring soon into a great NAS. Asus I think already makes a similar one but it isn't fanless
- toast0 4y agoYou can do a passive x16 -> 4 x4, iff your board supports pci-e bifurcation. Theoretically, you could do x16 -> 8 x2 also passively, but I haven't seen bifurcation go down to x2. PCI-e switches are probably too expensive for anything active though.
- Havoc 4y agoYep - board supports it. Unfortunately even the passive cards seem to be minimum 150 bucks. I have a feeling that by the time I get round to this 8TBs may be so cheap that dual of those in the mobo ports may be enough haha
- toast0 4y agoHere's one for half that... https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-M-2-X16-V2-Threadripper/dp/B07NQBQB6Z/ https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-M-2-X16-V2-Threadripper/dp/B07NQ... This isn't an endorsement. Just an encouragement to shop more. This one says pci-e 3.0, fwiw, but I don't know how important pci-e 4.0 is to you?
- Havoc 4y agoThanks :) > I don't know how important pci-e 4.0 is to you? My understanding was that 3.0 would bottleneck the nvme while 4.0 would not. 4 lanes of 1GB/s vs modern gen 4 nvmes at 6ish read. All a bit academic in NAS I suppose & still very much a concept...think I can get a bit more gaming/desktop use out of the old faithful still
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- jjoonathan 4y agoWhat are the current strategies for leveraging NVMe speed & volume in a NAS? When I look at NAS offerings, I see lots of 2.5" and 3.5" bays and 1Gbe (maaaybe 10Gbe at the high end) which is a bit stifling.
- toast0 4y agou.2 NVMe uses 2.5" bays and SATA Express connectors to offer up to 4 lanes of PCI-e or two lanes of SATA. That's probably where most of the enterprisy NAS is going.
- jeffbee 4y agoIn my humble opinion some home NAS use cases are beneficially converted to Thunderbolt. It's a lot more practical than the faster varieties of ethernet. If you have two hosts that need fast access to the NAS you can do it with TB4, and one of those hosts can re-export the stored resources for applications with lesser performance requirements, over SMB or iSCSI or whatever.
- rektide 4y ago40Gbps host-to-host networking in thunderbolt/usb4 is so epic & great to have.
- jjoonathan 4y agoDoes someone make a thunderbolt -> thunderbolt connector that exposes an ethernet PCIe endpoint to each host and forwards packets between them? 10 years ago I joked that someone should do this, but I thought high speed ethernet would trickle down and obviate the need. Evidently not, lol.
- jeffbee 4y agoIP-over-Thunderbolt is a thing. It's the thing we are discussing! All major operating systems can do it.
- lyind 4y agoThis nice approach has at least these drawbacks: 1. Swapping drives is hard * may be overcome by declaring failure domain = node 2. No powerloss protection advertised to OS, ie. slow synchronous writes * may be overcome by software hacks and whole-system battery supply 3. Potential slowdown on continuous write load (weeks or months, depending on drive) * may be overcome by software in _some_ situations At least the last two points are a no-go for enterprise use-cases, if not addressed.
- eqvinox 4y agoI'm gonna claim that this card isn't aimed at enterprise use-cases that need this kind of service. I'd put it along the lines of "nearline SAS" HDDs, aimed at non-critical applications where you care more about bulk capacity than reliability. Relatedly, M.2 SSDs are inherently slower than the same pile of silicon in an U.2/2.5" form factor — the power/heat budget is noticeably lower.
- ciupicri 4y ago> No powerloss protection advertised to OS How can the OS (I'm interested in Linux) know about this feature?
- wtallis 4y agoEnterprise SSDs almost always include power loss protection capacitors on the drive itself, so the drive can either directly advertise that it's write caches are non-volatile or simply ignore cache flush requests from the host since data in the cache can already be considered durable from the host's perspective. Unfortunately for this product, enterprise M.2 SSDs are almost always 110mm long rather than 80mm long, precisely because of the space taken up by those capacitors.
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- eqvinox 4y ago(Pulling up from child comment) The chip this uses is likely a PM4x100 (x ∈ {0, 1, 2}) from Microchip (formerly Microsemi (formerly PMC-Sierra)): https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/PM40100 https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/PM40100 ^ runs you $800 without bulk discounts [https://www2.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology-Atmel/PM40100B1-FEI?qs=TuK3vfAjtkVxKfKx2Q%2F8sw%3D%3D https://www2.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology-A...] — if you can get them, that is. https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/PM41100 https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/PM41100 https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/PM42100 https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/PM42100 ^ these latter two I don't see publicly listed prices for anywhere. The PCIe 5.0 equivalent is in "Samples available", i.e. not full production yet, which is likely why the card only does PCIe 4.0: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/PM50100 https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/PM50100
- rektide 4y agoCXL will also make attaching drives & ram a much easier experience, much more regular.
- rasz 4y ago>Apex Storage doesn't reveal the inner details of the X21 >In a single-card configuration, the X21 delivers sequential read and write speeds up to 30.5 GBps and 28.5 GBps, respectively. did they test it or reprint press release? >According to Apex Storage ah >The AIC has an average read and write access latency of 79us and 52us that doesnt make sense unless its additional latency of controller or they ship it populated with drieves. >However, Apex Storage didn't expose the type of RAID arrays. The X21 also flaunts "enterprise-grade reliability," NVMe 2.0 support, advanced EEC, data protection, and error recovery. Apex Storage didn't reveal the pricing or availability for the X21. so only revealed performance figures and pictures Their previous product was a fancy looking bracket for holding 16 SATA M.2 drives https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/storage-scaler/storage-scaler-16-x-m2-sata-iii-ssd-expansion-card https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/storage-scaler/storage-.... >A cross platform drop in card that can massively increase the amount of storage for your computer using cost effective m.2 SSDs. You had to read fine print to realized its just a m.2 stand requiring proper 16 port SATA controller to function. It still hasnt shipped to this day. Im mildly optimistic.
- qwertox 4y agoI wonder how the SSDs are exposed to the OS. While dealing with the Samsung Pro Firmware issue, I read that SSDs mounted on a hardware RAID controller need to be removed from the RAID in order to have their Firmware update applied, since Samsung's tool won't see the SSDs if they are placed on the controller.
- rasz 4y agoIf its indeed PM42100 based then you will see separate drives.
- rkagerer 4y agoFinally! A card worthy of replacing my Areca controllers. Now, is there an NVMe equivalent?
- h2odragon 4y ago> the manufacturer confirmed that the X21 offers 100 PCIe lanes, suggesting the presence of a PCIe switch. Almost like it's custom designed for a particular application where money's no concern... Perhaps someone in Utah needs big rainbow tables?
- mikece 4y agoThis is No Such Agency who would buy as many of these as could be produced...
- jeffbee 4y agoPeople like to throw the innuendo around but the NSA's pathetic little datacenter is something that you would lose in a corner of a real datacenter operated by a real hyperscale system like Amazon or Google.
- xen2xen1 4y agoBut the NSA one is dedicated to invading everyone's privac... Hey, wait!
- zamnos 4y agoJust like a cluster of Bitcoin miners will run absolute circles around a similarly sized corner of an AWS data center, and the supercomputer at Oak Ridge will run circles around a similar sized corner of AWS of GPU EC2 instances connected via gigabit Ethernet, the NSA's cluster's got a different use case than running web services for every SaaS company that wants to run in AWS. I imagine it's aimed at saving and analyzing/decrypting large amounts of data, and thus is architected and tuned towards that purpose, and thus runs circles around a similarly sized corner of AWS for that particular task. Unless you have experience with the NSA's cluster that you'd like to share with the rest of the class, that is.
- jeffbee 4y agoNeeds citation. I think the idea that the NSA has stronger data storage and analysis infrastructure than commercial operators is not even conjecture, it's something weaker, a fantasy. Commercial hyperscale operators claimed the ability to sort 50PB datasets at 600GB/s, eleven years ago. Storing and analyzing bulk data is the #1 thing these guys are good at.