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I'm sure there are data science/center people that can appreciate this. For me all I'm thinking is how hot it runs and how much I wish soon 20TB SSDs would be priced like HDDs
Agreed. I'd happily settle for 1GB/s, maybe even less, if I could get the random seek times, power usage, durability, and density of SSDs without paying through the nose.
I'd be more than happy with 1GB/s drives for storage. I'd be happy with SATA3 SSD speeds. I'd be happy if they were still sized like a 2.5" drive. USB4 ports go up to 80Gb/s. I'd be happy with an external drive bay with each slot doing 1 GB/s
nah datacenters care more about capacity or iops, throughput is meaningless, since you'll always be bottlenecked by network
A post about technology on the technology community?
What year is this?
Yeah, I didn't see Elon Musk, Trump, or AI mentioned at all. What's happening?
Ah. It's... Six times faster than my sdd that was already fast. This runs faster than some ram. God damn.
Which is the ultimate goal I think, if your main storage is already as fast as RAM then you just don't need RAM anymore and also can't run out of memory in most cases since the whole program is functionally already loaded.
So no need for RAM when?
One of the biggest bottlenecks in many workloads is latency. Cache miss and the CPU stalls waiting for main memory. Flash storage, even on an nvme bus is two orders of magnitude slower than ram.
For example L3 cache takes approximately 10-20 nano seconds, ram takes closer to 100 nano seconds, nvme flash is more than 10,000 nano seconds (>10 microseconds).
Depending on your age you may remember the transition from hard drives to ssds. They could make a machine feel much snappier. Early PC ssds weren't significantly faster throughput than hard drives (many now are even slower writing when they run out of SLC cache), what they were is significantly lower latency.
As an aside, Intel and Microns 3d xpoint was super interesting technically. It was capable of < 5000 nano seconds in early generation parts, meaning it sat in between DDR ram and flash.
15 GB/s is about on par with DDR3-1866. High-end DDR5 caa do well over triple that.
And that's not to mention the latency, which is the real point of RAM.
You want RAM because you don't want to have your computer store and constantly read/write to through TBs of temporary/useless data constantly. You need a form of cache for even faster read/write times.
Gigabytes of L3 cache when
Gigabytes plural? Maybe a while. Gigabyte singular? Already a thing. AMD EPYC 9684X(https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/4th-generation-9004-and-8004-series/amd-epyc-9684x.html)
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.
Why was Optane so good with random access? Why did Intel abandon the tech?
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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