so okay this thing is really weird you
guys like it looks like a regular old oh there we go m.2
SSD but not only can you glue one of these
to one of these but you can actually have it show up as a single drive of up
to 32 terabytes and they also claim that
built into this thing they've got slc flash you guys remember slc one cell
equals one bit super fast super reliable and super expensive but
at a price of just 330 dollars just what
kind of scam are these guys trying to pull here i don't know but i know our
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when i say SSD and modis probably isn't
the first word to pop into your mind but chances are that you have heard of them
before even if it was indirectly their fuse drive tiered storage software was
actually licensed by AMD as the first version of their store my raid feature
for ryzen and threadripper and this as
far as i can tell is their first consumer hardware offering an SSD that's
also called fusedrive they say it's two
ssds in one and runs with artificial intelligence that gives it endurance as
good as a samsung 970 pro which
you smell that kind of smells like grade a marketing to
me i mean it's challenging enough to put one SSD in a package to size let alone
two and we can clearly see from the pcb
layout and the markings on the dies that this is just a regular vanilla qlc SSD
with a single controller on it except maybe it's not the big reason why adding
layers causes endurance to drop is because of the voltages required to
write to each layer but what most people
don't realize is that multi-level nand
can be used in a single level mode where only a single layer of each cell is
actually used at a time now it cuts the capacity of
qlc to one quarter but it also offers
nearly the same speed and nearly the same endurance of native slc this
concept is nothing new though and large vendors like Intel or samsung have
actually been using this slc mode to
cache their drives and improve performance for years now but here's the
new idea most ssds that use slc mode
caching use a dynamically sized cache
rather than dedicating a chunk of the SSD for it and non-tech reports that
Intel 660p for example starts out with
76 gigabytes of slc cache but then that
can go as low as just six gigs as the drive fills up that means that it will
sacrifice over time both the performance
and endurance that it was supposed to gain from the slc cache so
back to in modis's marketing claims then they're taking a different approach by
creating a permanently segmented one and a half terabyte qlcssd with a separately
addressable 128 gig slc portion i didn't
put a graphics card in here one moment please
man i love how unhappy the d drive is you know what i'm saying it's so upset
hey the performance looks all right though it's rated for 34 megabytes per
second reads and it's just shy of that and rated for 3 000
megabytes per second writes which is fine just fine for a qlc SSD wait no
that's really good for qlc now those numbers are much better than what you'd
expect writing to qlc flash that is the range that i would expect as long as the
slc cache is working correctly because that is way better than what we would
see writing to in particular qlc flash
in qlc mode compared to our pci express
gen 4 tlc boot drive though these numbers
don't look that impressive even with enmodis's slc caching
what they also have up their sleeve though is the ability to quickly and
easily extend the SSD volume with a hard drive so let's see how that looks you
can see this illustrated when we compare to our pci express gen 4 tlc boot drive
read speeds thanks to the wider bus are way better on that one but ride speeds
because we're not taking advantage of an slc cache actually
kind of suck by comparison theoretically this is as simple as plugging in a hard
drive
we then fire up in modis's fusion x software and we're going to make a
non-bootable fuse drive so our in modus SSD is our fast drive
and our seagate hard drive is our slow i mean i
i guess we could do it the other way around but that would be very stupid oh
hey here it goes oh wow you can actually un-tier it when you're done if you don't
like it anymore for whatever reason that's cool truthfully i kind of
expected the 128 gig slc drive to appear
separately in device manager but it doesn't it's just
permanently allocated to accelerate your one and a half terabyte SSD so in a way
this is not dissimilar to when people used to manually over provision the
flash in their drives for more consistent performance way back in the
day before trim and garbage collection had matured
to the point that they have now oh it's done drive 3
is made up of drives two and one one plus two is three
oh and so our fuse drive all two tiers of it are
totally invisible to me now and it just
shows up as a 12.3 terabyte hard drive
so we've got all the capacity of both but they're combined let's just like i
don't know let's just throw some let's throw some footage onto it or something
okay the SSD caching is definitely working
what i want is to actually hit the hard drive i want to see this go down to like
200 megabytes a second Anthony says i won't be able to do it but i i see that
as a challenge while this is running is actually a good time to bring up that
you can run a configuration like this as your boot drive so you can actually run
Windows off of this which as we've talked about numerous times in the past
is an ideal use case for this type of
caching or tiering solution because your
operating system tends to hit the same files many many
many times and then most of it can sit in cold or warm storage only to be
accessed infrequently and that's exactly how this works
i'm just gonna keep doing this yeah we're still well over two gigs a
second you know what i was probably expecting
to be able to break through it because most of the caching solutions that i've
used before use much much smaller ssds
but i mean even though it's qlc flash it's
much faster than a hard drive so being able to write two i mean a terabyte and
a half of SSD means you would i mean it would come up but you would
basically never actually see that hard
drive like speed maybe the first time you load up you know call of duty if you
haven't played it in a year you know you would have to actually pull
the whole thing from hard drive but then it should promote that data into the SSD
so the next time you fire it up it's quick one of the dangers however of
using a nand based storage device like an SSD as a cache is that a right cache
well by its very nature gets written to far more frequently than a drive that
you're just using normally because you write to it once when you write the data
to the combined drive and then if that data gets demoted it gets replaced with
something else and then if it gets promoted back into the cache you write
that same data again that can be really problematic
but and modis says that with their
gold endurance they managed to
somehow dramatically outperform the mere
600 program erase cycles that their qlc
nand is rated for i mean how can they
claim with a straight face that their drive is good for something like three
times the endurance that samsung advertises for their shiny new 980 pro
i mean we we looked at it this is a fairly bog
standard fizen controller qlc SSD well
it turns out this data is kind of a your mileage may vary situation and modis
says that hot data that is frequently accessed spends a lot more of its time
in that slc portion than on the warm qlc
layer so unlike traditional slc caching where storage from the whole drive is
used for in-flight rights and then they just flush out the cache when it's idle
and modis is using a dedicated eight-channel nand chip and their
tiering mechanism activates on right so writes are immediately done on slc
then they're only moved out when they haven't been modified in a while that
actually helps prevent wear on the qlc layers now for something like our
blackmagic cameras where we put m.2 ssds
into usb enclosures and then can write as much as the entire drive in a single
session there'd be next to no benefit from this approach but for a desktop
user who's not likely to routinely write hundreds of gigabytes of data or when
they do it might be a program or game that they're also going to be you know
playing and using frequently for a bit
starting to make a lot of sense and that's exactly who modis says they're
marketing these drives for for the time being they're only available directly
from in modis but they're hoping to partner with system integrators in the future
so bottom line it's always a balancing act
you've got your price you got your performance and you've got your
endurance pick too but and modis thinks they've
got that sweet spot that comes closest to picking all three and they actually
even put RGB on it even though we never did turn that on you do of course give
up a little of each of those things to get this kind of balance though so what
do you guys think is it worth it one thing i know is worth it is subscribing
on Floatplane for that sweet behind-the-scenes content madison did a
an office tour that was very her style for sure i'm sorry i did make
you look bad i didn't mean to and it's also worth checking out our
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if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out one of our previous videos
exploring the concept of SSD or optane caching on slower spinning rust
really is cool stuff enterprise storage concepts in your gaming pc