Next-Level SSD Performance – Samsung 980 Pro 1TB Review

Yes, I understand this. What I am thinking of is the overhead of reading and constructing each block from flash. Is this really limited by the USB controller capability(I guess theoretically yes since its in the chain?) or is it just limited by the Flash controller and typical USB controllers. I guess we can test a theoretical bottleneck by running an IOPS test and comparing it to official Benchmark numbers of that Optaine model. That way we can eliminate the USB controller if the numbers match up.

This is the structure from what I understand. PC Host Controller<--->USB Controller(in the enclosure)<--->Flash Controller(On the SSD)<--->Flash chip(On the SSD). Is this wrong?

So here with Optane we have a massively high throughput of small files but a lower throughput of large files.

Is this scenario something that a USB controller would noticeably slow down? I have never tested this before.

A regular SSD has lower throughput of small files in exchange for high throughput of large files(slower throughput but higher bulk transfer) which is noticeable if the USB controller was not up to the task (See most USB Drives which have this + flash controller on the same board)

Basically the whole reason this idea came up in my head is that I notice that despite using high bandwidth drives to install clean Windows and Linux copies, I notice certain bottlenecks in the install process that I suspect are a result of many small files being copied/unpacked(either copying package files in Linux or unpacking the WIM in Windows).

So that led to me wanting to benchmark a High IOPS drive and comparing it to low IOPS to see once and for all if the install process is choking on the drive vs something else (ie. the CPU capability for decompressing). Its just a weirdo side project that I wanted to try.

Eventually I even wanted to somehow try a ramdisk type scenario although I don't think that sort of hardware exists.

This is also motivated by the fact that I don't have a way to intercept the file reading process on the drive as they are being read to see if the drive really is the source of any bottlenecks or if its the installer code.

PS5's custom SSD will be 5.5 GBps. But it supports M.2 expansion.

> "We will be supporting certain M2 SSDs," Cerny confirmed. "These are internal drives that you can get on the open market and install in a bay on the PS5. They connect through the custom IO unit just like our SSD does, so they can take full advantage of the decompression, IO co-processors, and all the other features I was talking about. Here's the catch though: that commercial drive has to be at least as fast as ours. Games that rely on the speed of our SSD need to work flawlessly with any M2 drive."

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PCIe 4.0 is a very flexible and high-bandwidth protocol. GPUs have been doing PCIe -> GPU transfers for some time (without any intervention of CPU or DDR4 RAM). Its good to hear that the PS5 is fully taking advantage of these capabilities.

But it does mean that M.2 drives of a certain speed are needed to effectively play PS5 games, should you use the M.2 expansion port.

Which is ironic because NVMe was supposed to be more efficient and doing less work because it's design wasn't bound with SATA&spinning assumptions and controller doesn't need to handle pcie-SATA conversions since it's directly connected to the bus etc.

One problem with m.2 is the spec would permit a module with the controller on the bottom where it would be difficult to cool. But I think so far nobody has been dumb enough to ship one.