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[-] Thrashy@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

The trouble with ridiculous R/W numbers like these is not that there's no theoretical benefit to faster storage, it's that the quoted numbers are always for sequential access, whereas most desktop workloads are more frequently closer to random, which flash memory kinda sucks at. Even really good SSDs only deliver ~100MB/sec in pure random access scenarios. This is why you don't really feel any difference between a decent PCIe 3.0 M.2 drive and one of these insane-o PCI-E 5.0 drives, unless you're doing a lot of bulk copying of large files on a regular basis.

It's also why Intel Optane drives became the steal of the century when they went on clearance after Intel abandoned the tech. Optane is basically as fast in random access as in sequential access, which means that in some scenarios even a PCIe 3.0 Optane drive can feel much, much snappier than a PCIe 4 .0 or 5.0 SSD that looks faster on paper.

[-] Gg901@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

Why was Optane so good with random access? Why did Intel abandon the tech?

[-] kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 weeks ago

which flash memory kinda sucks at.

Au contraire, flash is amazing at random R/W compared to all previous non-volatile technologies. The fastest hard drives can do what, 4MB/s with 4k sectors, assuming a quarter rotation per random seek? And that's still fantastic compared to optical media, which in turn is way better than tape.

Obviously, volatile memory like SDRAM puts it to shame, but I'm a pretty big fan of being able to reboot.

this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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