requesting some help understanding m2, U2 and SSD options...

[Twice_Shy]

Sooo let me start with the fact that i've been impoverished and am really behind the times. Neither of my main PC's even have an SSD, even for Adobe CC, because upgrades kept getting postponed due to unplanned medical and other bills and "it was still working" for my limited use so I didn't worry about it.

I'm finally researching to upgrade in part because Adobe is now consistently complaining about and refusing to even run the latest versions on the hardware I have available. (I had a newer core i7 wacom cintiq with an SSD but that's having problems with a dying fan, so to avoid killing that I have to minimize use of it/saved for when drawing only and so am back on the older hardware) So at least I need a stopgap to last another couple years, and a plan for what to upgrade after that for a higher performing desktop once I finally can pursue that.


So my next desktop needs to have an m2 SSD added to it because i'm sure lacking one is bottlenecking Adobe performance, which has been getting slower and slower with each release. (even browsers seem to be accessing files in a way that expects an SSD now/running slower than they ever did before, and task mangler shows it hitting the HD to touch every file it's ever seen in months or some stupid thing from the Downloads list)

Adobe used to want you to use even three separate drives if you could for the OS/app, your loaded assets, and your scratchfile disk since disks were limited by IO and transfer rate and those were three distinct bottleneck points. I'm not even sure if this advice still applies in the age of m2 speed - like i'm assuming a single m2 drive (which is at least 4x faster than a SATA SSD) would be faster than using three SATA SSD's configured like that, since IOPS is no longer likely the bottleneck.

I'm wondering if using two or three separate m2 drives would be that much faster, or if the bottleneck is likely to go back to the cpu cores, gpu and such by then.

I'm curious whether the enterprise U2 format would have a point - from reading some things here I see it's got better heat management, larger capacity (not a personal concern right now, a few TB is plenty/I dont have huge assets or scratch needs right now), and 10x the lifespan endurance - the last of which might matter.

I'm curious whether an m2 drive is just used like a normal SSD drive/replaces it entirely, or if i'm planning to have SATA SSD's in addition to fast m2 drives for more special speed bottlenecked use.

I've seen the pcie x16 cards that mount 4 m2 drives and i'm not sure if they are combined into one big drive, one fast drive, or treated as four separate drives, or whether any special mobo support is needed for any of that. I would specifically like to put these in an older workstation that doesn't have built in m2 support, and i'm running a workstation instead of a new desktop because huge RAM amounts are more affordable for when I upgrade - thats because After Effects is an absolute monster on system requirements and I might just go to 256gb.


I'm pretty budget constrained but not necessarily in a cheap up front way, if a consumer SSD is just going to burn out in 6 months from overuse i'd rather get the long endurance one to last a few years yet. I mostly edit in 1080p for the time being and wont migrate to 4-6k high bitrate stuff til I have good cameras and all plans for that have been held up by life taking unplanned turns since covid.

In addition to Adobe CC on Windows 10, i'm also trying to start using ProTools, Davinci Resolve v18, some lighter After Effects use soon. I will also be building a hackintosh and using Final Cut Pro X on a separate computer though I doubt that would treat SSD's radically different than Windows. Any suggestions of specific advice or where to educate myself on the options are welcome.

 

[Tech Junky]

SSD just means it doesn't spin.
M2 is the consumer connector type.
U.x drives come in a 2.5" format like a laptop drive but have a different connector type on them.

M2 drives have different generations which relate to their speed. 3/4/5 a this point where a 3 maxes at 3.5GB/s, 4 at 7.2GB/s, and 5 maxes at 14GB/s. So, that's on average 13x, 26x, or 52x faster than a spinner. Cut those in half for a SATA SSD.

Life span in these drives under normal use should last at least a decade or more.

U drives are comparable in price excluding the adapters and cables to tin them on consumer boards. The advantage comes with the higher capacity drives at 8TB a consumer M2 would run about $800 where the U would be half that. U drives also go beyond 8TB up to 30 or 60 TB.

 

[nexox]

The other form factor option for SSDs is a regular card, usually 4x, sometimes 8x, PCIe 3.0, and they can often be found for at or below $100/TB, the Intel SSD 750 is a decent model to look for, but any Intel is likely pretty good. The p3608 and p4608 are interesting because they combine two p3600 or p4600 SSDs onto one card with a PCIe switch and run on an x8 slot for full bandwidth with no bifurcation required, that means they count as two devices for your isolation of storage.

I would also look at fixing the workloads, some of what you mentioned is probably just avoidable.

 

[Twice_Shy]

That's a pretty good quick braindump on specs. So what is the best for each use case?

Like when should I prefer 'sata connected ssd space' over just using a few large m2 drives? Ever?

When would I seriously want to look at U2 over m2 drives? I know they have certain advantages, you said 8gig or more for instance (wasnt sure if that was used or brand new)... using more wattage as one tradeoff, but i'm already using old workstations which use more electricity for less cpu power so that's always an option at times. So my guess is high endurance situations below 8gb?

I've seen talk about 'PLP circuitry' something involving sustained writes, which sounded like that might be relevant like for a Premiere scratchdrive for sustained processing of footage...

I'm assuming sata3 speed still pegs an ssd at 500GB/sec but maybe SAS attached SSD's have some place where they're valid, it sorta sounded like that's what some of the U2 drives might be for to begin with even.

 

[nexox]

The PLP thing and sustained writes are kind of related, ish - enterprise drives have capacitors to make sure they don't lose writes on power failure, and their workloads tend to be constant, so the PLP drives tend to be designed to provide their rated performance for extended periods of time. Consumer workloads tend to be more bursty, so they can use slower NAND coupled with some faster NAND as a write cache, and increasingly volatile DRAM to really inflate the benchmark numbers - once you fill any cache by writing faster than the slow NAND your performance drops until you let the drive have a break to catch up.

Quality SATA SSDs are still pretty good, I have a pile of Intel S3700s that I'd prefer over a bunch of modern consumer NVMe drives, though the capacity is admittedly lower, at least they don't lose data on power failure or slow down when I abuse them. The real advantage to SATA is that you can connect them to anything cheaply, no expensive adapters or cables and they don't use much power or need any cooling.

M.2 is really a laptop form factor that for some reason took over desktops and it's compromised because of it, too small physically, power limits of the slot are too low, and the cooling is so awful they often can't even reject the heat created running at that constrained power level. As far as I'm concerned they're good for boot drives and compact systems and not much else.

 

[nexox]

One other thing on Intel add in card SSDs specifically - they often come with the wrong bracket (or no bracket,) they almost use a standard low profile bracket except the screws go through the bracket rather than threading in, so you can take any other standard tall bracket from a RAID card or whatever, drill out the screw holes, file that section flat, and use it with the Intel SSD.

 

[Twice_Shy]

Is the PLP performance difference normally tested when benchmarking SSD's? Like how much cache it has so its one transfer rate up to so many gigs, and then another transfer rate beyond that... i'm going to make a guess that if I have files that I expect to fit in a cache, say a video file being processed in Premiere, if it all fits it should process fast, and if it doesn't, then it will be at the slower speed. (but a PLP drive will be consistent and possibly worth it IF I end up with large files that seem to hit the cache limit - which might require testing for bottlenecks)

Above you said something " I would also look at fixing the workloads, some of what you mentioned is probably just avoidable. " but I wasn't sure what you meant, what could be avoided by what workloads, or how they would be changed... I mostly edit video for film class so dont' know how the workload can be changed.

Oh I realized something else - I DO want to play around some with virtualization, and thats a different enough use case that it's worth mentioning. I'm working towards experiments with eventually virtualizing two OS at once so one workstation can run two separate video processing instances. Would something like that might tip things in favor of U2 drives with PLP sustained rates or if I made one m2 drive go to each virtual machine dedicated is it irrelevant?

Any recommendations in the "multiple m2's on one pcie x16 card" as well as single m2's on x4 cards, to add to older pre m2 PC's - does the card matter much (or mobo support, or drivers for windows vs linux vs macintosh) or are they all about the same. (aka no different than a pcie riser just connecting signals, so get anything, and spend for the m2 nvme drives instead)

 

[nexox]

Consumer SSD benchmarks are usually pretty lame, but sometimes you can find estimates of the cache size, but many of them dynamically use TLC NAND as SLC and thus the available cache size shrinks as the drive fills up, kind of another way to make big benchmark numbers on brand new drives.

As far as workload, stuff like the browser reading all the downloaded files, either move those files or use a different browser, don't buy hardware to fix that.

Multiple NVMe, whether they're M.2 or connectors for cables to U.2 require either a PLX switch chip (expensive) or a motherboard that supports bifurcation. M.2 on a card will get tricky to cool, especially if you go for 4 of them

 

[BlueFox]

You don't need an enterprise SSD. If you're working off hard drives, literally anything will be better. Even budget consumer SSDs have higher endurance than a hard drive. Get the cheapest thing you can find since you're budget constrained. Not joking.

 

[Tech Junky]

regular card,

I forget those even exist since they're so dismal when it comes to performance / capacity / price. But, yes, they do exist but so do the EDSFF in different ruler sizes for blade servers.

'sata connected ssd space' over just using a few large m2 drives? Ever?

Only if you want less speed and generally cooler operating drives as they don't have hot controllers bumping the temps up. There's also a capacity limit as to how much they'll cram inside the casing.

When would I seriously want to look at U2 over m2 drives? I know they have certain advantages, you said 8gig or more for instance (wasnt sure if that was used or brand new)... using more wattage as one tradeoff, but i'm already using old workstations which use more electricity for less cpu power so that's always an option at times. So my guess is high endurance situations below 8gb?

TB not GB. There's a price parity between the two up to 4TB in size ~$200 and then it jumps considerably on the M2 side but moderately on the U.x version.

The U drives being server oriented will push up to ~25W while the M2's typically cap out at 10W. It depends on how hard you hammer them though with data. Good rule of thumb when it comes to tech is if it runs cooler it will last longer. M2's don't have the surface area that a 2.5" U drive does when it comes to dissipating heat from the drive/controller. Though different OEMs means different temps as well. My Kioxia idles at 40C and some Micron's idle at 70C.

Also, if you look at the charts for most of the U drives the higher the capacity you go the faster the speeds you get.

CD8-R Series (2.5-inch) | KIOXIA - United States (English)

KIOXIA CD8-R Series is a read intensive data center NVMe™ SSD that is optimized to support a broad range of scale-out and cloud applications, including big data/IoT, online transaction processing, and virtualization. Built with a PCIe® 4.0 (16 GT/s x4) interface, CD8-R Series SSDs deliver...

americas.kioxia.com

PLP

Power Loss Protection..... flushes the cache to the NAND if the drive was active at failure.

SAS

It's just really the signaling method and a clue to the bandwidth....
IDE
PATA
SATA1/2/3
SAS....

Untangling terms: M.2, NVMe, USB-C, SAS, PCIe, U.2, U.3, OCuLink, E1.S, E1.L

Updated on Jan 15, 2024

mokosiy.medium.com

SATA revision 3.0	6 Gbit/s	600 MB/s[88]
SATA revision 2.0	3 Gbit/s	300 MB/s
SATA revision 1.0	1.5 Gbit/s	150 MB/s[89]	1
PATA (IDE) 133	1.064 Gbit/s	133.3 MB/s[f]	0.46 m (18 in)	5 V (only 2.5-inch drive 44-pin connector)	2
SAS-4	22.5 Gbit/s	2.25 GB/s	10 m	Backplane connectors only	1 (> 65k with expanders)
SAS-3	12 Gbit/s	1.2 GB/s
SAS-2	6 Gbit/s	600 MB/s
SAS-1	3 Gbit/s	300 MB/s

cache

AKA DRAM.... there's 2 types of M2's with and without.... the ones without use your PC RAM instead of having it on board on the M2 itself. Not all M2 drives will perform the same though even if they have the same cache on board. The controller makes a difference as well as the NAND itself.

Any recommendations in the "multiple m2's on one pcie x16 card" as well as single m2's on x4 cards, to add to older pre m2 PC's - does the card matter much (or mobo support, or drivers for windows vs linux vs macintosh) or are they all about the same. (aka no different than a pcie riser just connecting signals, so get anything, and spend for the m2 nvme drives instead)

As @nexox mentioned PLX would be needed on ancient PCs and Intel based consumer options. AMD offers bifurcation which can split that x16 into x4/x4/x4/x4 or x8/x8 but allows for using the cheap quad M2 PCB adapters under $100 vs the PLX options for Intel which usually start out at $200 for dual drives and closer to $550 for 4 drives.

virtualization

depends on a whole lot of things besides just storage. The main bottlenecks will be the CPU/GPU you choose and the container software and how it handles passing those 2 off to the guests.

 

[nexox]

You don't need an enterprise SSD. If you're working off hard drives, literally anything will be better. Even budget consumer SSDs have higher endurance than a hard drive. Get the cheapest thing you can find since you're budget constrained. Not joking.

I guess I missed the part about not having an SSD at all when I initially skimmed the post, yeah, Windows hasn't worked quickly on a spinning disk since long before SSDs were viable for home use. I think I would grab a 480 or 800GB Intel S3500, you could go slightly cheaper or slightly faster with a consumer drive but I don't know the options there, had far too many issues with those over the years to shop for them now.

 

[Bert]

You don't need an enterprise SSD. If you're working off hard drives, literally anything will be better. Even budget consumer SSDs have higher endurance than a hard drive. Get the cheapest thing you can find since you're budget constrained. Not joking.

Yes please don't spend the money you don't have and even sata SSDs are fine. Buy a $20 SAS controller and RAID 0 them if you want more performance. Make sure you have hard drives for backup and back up your work every time.

This is my set up for lightroom. 3-4 SATA SSDs connected to ADAPTEC 71605 SAS card. Probably costs around $100 for 1TB set up. SAS card allows me to have the higher throughput as onboard SATA Raid is limited but not necessary. I have been using this set up over a decade now. One caveat it is ugly with cables.

You don't need to buy a whole new computer with bifurcation and etc. If you already have a computer with bifurcation, then sure get 4x NVMe adapter and get consumer grade NVMe. You can buy them cheap from community members.

Adaptec ASR 71605 1GB 16Port HBA RAID PCIe Controller Card + 4* SATA Cables | eBay

We keep our promises that we will provide you with the best solution within 24 hours.

www.ebay.com

Not recommending to go with this but just a quick search to show how affordable that would be. You can get 2x 512 SATA SSD or 4 x 256 GB SATA SSD for another $40, $50 . You can continue to use your hard drives for back up.

 

[Tech Junky]

please don't spend the money you don't have and even sata SSDs are fine.

I'm not suggesting that and simply providing the info about the different drive types and a comparison of pricing for capacity.

I don't know what kind of budget @Twice_Shy is working with but, if they're planning a new build to replace the existing spinners it's good to know the options before diving into it and spending more for less. M2's are a mass sales thing cooked up by the market for convenience of consumers to just slide it into the socket and put the screw into the holder. It's quite obvious that there's a cartel effect when you go beyond 4TB of space though. There's no reason an 8TB drive should be $100/TB when the U drops to $50/TB at the same size and even less when you venture into the 16TB models.

With storage though there's always a tier that fits a budget. You trade speed / reliability for cost. Spinners are great for capacity at pennies on the dollar but, they're slow unless you get one of the fabled Seagate dual actuator mythical creatures that hit the same speed of an SSD. Personally I will never use another Seagate drive due to being burned twice in the past.

Raid striping is a way to mux the output of the drives though that might be an advantage to get to higher speeds but, it also consumes resources quickly when tying up multiple ports to make it work. If you take the total cash output it sometimes makes more sense to put it towards something more advanced and conserve resources on the MOBO. Using a single NVME x4 leaves additional resources available for other things whether networking or GPU.

There's many ways to "adapt" storage into more streamlined approaches though as well with PCIE cards that fan out into multiple drives. This goes for any type of drive though whether a spinner or SSD. If you want to KISS it then going with a direct drive to port is easiest without messing around with cards and firmware flashing and so on. There's a saying about cheap, right, but never both. Finding the happy medium and planning things out is the key to being happy with your tech designs and performance.

 

[BlueFox]

They have no budget, per their other threads (and this one), certainly not for 4TB or 8TB SSDs. They need something like this just to get going: INTEL SSDSC2BX800G4 800GB 2.5 SATA S3610 2.5 SSD | eBay

OP, if you're that constrained on funds, I can just give you a 256GB one for free.

 

[Tech Junky]

They have no budget, per their other threads

Well, I haven't been stalking other threads so, if that's the case it's just info being given at this point.

 

[nabsltd]

Consumer workloads tend to be more bursty, so they can use slower NAND coupled with some faster NAND as a write cache

Many also use a hybrid NAND mode that means you get horrible throughput when the drive has more used blocks. They use the (TQ)LC on the drive in SLC mode by only writing one bit of the grouping, and later gathering this into regular blocks. This gives a huge speed boost, but once you write 1/N of the drive (where N=3 or 4 depending on the T/Q part), the speed drops to nothing, as the drive has to gather the data.

It also means that without free blocks, you won't get the speed. This can happen even if the underlying data doesn't take up much room if TRIM/DISCARD isn't working correctly, or is handled by some sort of cron job instead of in real time.

Enterprise drives generally have both DRAM and separate SLC NAND for the fast cache, and better "gather" algorithms to move from cache to the final destination. Since the SLC is much smaller than 1/4 of the drive, you don't get the max speed for as long, but the long-term speed is much higher than on a consumer drive.

 

[Twice_Shy]

As far as workload, stuff like the browser reading all the downloaded files, either move those files or use a different browser, don't buy hardware to fix that.

Multiple NVMe, whether they're M.2 or connectors for cables to U.2 require either a PLX switch chip (expensive) or a motherboard that supports bifurcation. M.2 on a card will get tricky to cool, especially if you go for 4 of them

I got that, I just also know Adobe and some other apps aren't the most efficiently programmed, and with some of those apps i'll have no choice about switching to something else due to requirements of compatibility.

I'm sorry but i'm still a little vague on the multi NVMe... so those PCIe cards which have like 4 m2 slots on a physical x16 card... that requires special motherboard support? That's not something that can just plug into 'any' older system like a Haswell/Broadwell era or something?

I'd seen some cards come with fans, or be rigged up to have fans.

You don't need an enterprise SSD. If you're working off hard drives, literally anything will be better. Even budget consumer SSDs have higher endurance than a hard drive. Get the cheapest thing you can find since you're budget constrained. Not joking.

I got that... but i'm very curious under which conditions I WILL benefit from an enterprise SSD.

I'm the unwilling computer tech for a small group of people trying to do video production stuff. What i'm building first for me, will turn into other machines later for others, or upgrades and similar.

I get that even the cheapest low end SSD will be an improvement in performance, but since a few hundred dollars is being budgeted for some things i'm curious where things go from cheap to best value/bang for the buck. Like I know the smallest of the sub-terabyte drives apparently wear out alot faster, like 1/4th the size, 1/4th the cost, but also 1/4th the lifespan meaning if you buy three more in the next 2-3 years i'm not sure that savings makes sense. Suggesting 1tb might be the smallest recommended "for all but the cheapest" to actually do any basic work on. (cheapest for a web browser to not thrash a drive, but 1tb to run basic 1080p editing for instance)

Over 4tb in one SSD look at U2 - I got that, though that may be a bit off.

Long endurance ex-enterprise drives - I had some suggested last year (but didn't have the budget at that time to buy from unexpected bills) and since then m2 drives have gone UP in price, I don't know if the U2's from then are equally up, or up more, or the same and an even better deal.

I know there are some Adobe type uses that if youre gonna thrash on the drive can wear out SSD's faster. I don't have those uses memorized I was just asked to investigate the long endurance drives as an option and to figure out when it should be used instead of a normal consumer m2 ssd.


The other big long useful info-heavy post and whats after i'll have to come back to, just was catching up at least this far.

 

[BlueFox]

You're not going to wear out even a cheap consumer SSD. Endurance is a non-issue. You don't need to spend more. For your workload, there is honestly no use case where you will benefit from an enterprise one. They are cheaper when you get to very large capacities, but that's well outside of your budget.

 

[nabsltd]

I got that... but i'm very curious under which conditions I WILL benefit from an enterprise SSD.

For me, it's when you want smaller than currently popular SSDs, or much larger.

You can get used 400 and 800GB Intel enterprise SATA SSDs very cheaply, and even if they have been used hard, they still have plenty of life left due to the 3DWPD endurance rating. It's really hard to find new SSDs that small that are any good...usually that size has no DRAM, cheap controllers, etc.

On the flip side, once you want more than 2TB, start looking at used enterprise drives, because new consumer drives basically top out at 4TB, and (once again), the used drive is cheaper per TB, and you end up getting a better product.

 

[nexox]

I'm sorry but i'm still a little vague on the multi NVMe... so those PCIe cards which have like 4 m2 slots on a physical x16 card... that requires special motherboard support?

Yeah, unless you get the expensive card with a PCIe switch built in. The feature is called bifurcation, Haswell/Broadwell E5 Xeons may support it, depends on the motherboard manufacturer and BIOS, Intel consumer CPUs and Xeons based on them generally don't. If you wanted to go that way, which doesn't really sound necessary, you'd need to dig into the BIOS settings for your machine to see if you can manually configure the x16 slot to x4x4x4x4.

I would figure out how much space you actually need, then buy one or two used SATA SSDs to cover that - you can always move stuff back to spinning disks to free up some SSD space when you're not actively working on something.

The best way to find good prices is, of course, to set up saved ebay searches and jump on a deal before anyone else can - I have seen multiple 1-2TB enterprise SATA SSDs briefly available for under $50 recently.