this is speed
Gen 4 more like Jen snore gen 5. I feel
alive this PCIe Gen 5 SSD May well be the
fastest m.2 drive on the planet over 12
gigabytes a second that is so fast you
could move your Warzone install in about five seconds and even if you're more
into playing games than copy pasting them around with direct storage
compatible titles finally hitting the market Gamers might have a reason to add
storage speed to their list of specs
that actually matter let's see what this thing can do wait a minute
69 megabytes a second that's not nice
that's not nice at all just like it's not nice to make you wait
and find out what's going on after this message from our sponsor thanks to the
ridge for sponsoring this video made with premium quality materials the ridge
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before we get into the inconvenient details let's talk about what makes the
crucial t700 a hair among tortoises a
star among planets a diamond among roughs it starts with the interface
while this may look exactly like the
kind of m.2 drive that you would install in your PC and in fact you could since
it's fully backwards compatible when paired with a PCIe Gen 5 capable CPU and
motherboard it goes from a theoretical maximum of 7.9 gigabytes a second to
nearly 16 gigabytes a second but Linus
you might say even your best case scenario demo you did had it anywhere
from 11 to 12 gigabytes a second uh well
yes while the interface itself can hit
the speeds I just said this is our big but wait there's less moment you see
there's more than one factor that affects the real world performance of an
SSD and the interface is one of them but
another is the controller and our t700
here has a doozy of a controller the new
fizen e26 is an eight channel controller that can easily handle drives with four
terabytes of capacity at speeds of up to 14 gigabytes per second that is nearly
double the speed of their end game Gen 4 controller
I know 14 gigabytes a second is also not
12 but you're forgetting the third major factor that affects SSD performance The
nand Flash that actually stores the data and this is the hardest part to scale
honestly the fact that this thing is as fast as it is is a modern Miracle the
t700 uses micron's latest 232 layer TLC
nand at 2 000 Mega transfers per second to deliver the performance we saw up to
12 plus gigabytes per second of sequential reads and about 11 gigabytes
per second of sequential rights in both the 2 and 4 terabyte capacities now
curiously it seems that by pushing the dies to their full rated 2400 Mega
transfers per second they could probably saturate the fize and e26 controller but
there are some reasons that they might not do that starting with that it
probably wouldn't affect anything behind me is two identical ryzen 7950x bench
PCS courtesy of our lab on the left we've got the Samsung 990 Pro probably
the fastest Gen 4 SSD on the market if
you ignore the firmware issues on the right we've got the t700 Gen 5 baby uh
time for our Crystal dismark drag race let's go okay your your team your team
last year gen gen four gen four wait how many of these t700 tradition versus
modernity this is great all right we ready yeah let's go let's go let's go
didn't even count in what why I went okay it was already around now yeah I
want to win what can I say oh look at this see you
later buddy how's my rearview mirror treating you oh my God this is brutal
literally more than double double the performance
we're back to sequentials let's go right
speed baby particularly those lower Q depth
sequentials just crushing the Gen 4 Drive
uh that's my first L if you look closely
you'll notice the weak improvements in random reads and random writes which
funnily enough is the category of Drive activity that represents typical
day-to-day use and it's also where most
drives struggle why is that so slow
well here's the thing writing to an SSD is kind of like boarding an airplane
each row is a block and if you want to add a person to a row well first you
need to pull everyone out of that row so the new person can get in then everyone
has to sit back down this takes time with sequential rights people ready to
be seated together in convenient groups of three you can fill several rows or
blocks quickly but with random rights you've got different people trickling in
and out of different sections at different times and they all got to
squeeze into the various random open seats on the plane sequential rights are
also slowed down when there are people already sitting in a row but when
there's some down time the flight attendants are running the trim function
where they move people who have been seated in their own rows into rows with
other people so that when an influx of new passengers come along we don't have
to worry as much about doing the awkward seat dance when those random rights do
happen though boy does it ever suck here we go Adam let's go oh we're doing what
are we doing now we want we are opening some programs oh let's see let's open
some programs okay so we should close steam let's close steam yeah launch Team
okay three two one go
okay that was this same same even the
ads lived at the same uh uh uh Edge
three two one go
um maybe something heavier uh like a game maybe closed Edge okay PC Mark's
kind of a dog yeah open up PC mark one two three go
oh whoa that was a pretty big win actually significant yeah okay but can
we repeat it three two one go
uh uh okay now on the subject of PC mark
it did in the storage Benchmark show a
solid win for the new drive with the t700 leading by about 16 but in less
good news when we fired up for spoken which at this point is our only PC
showcase for direct storage um it was just plain couldn't tell the
difference that's not to say we couldn't measure the difference we were looking at about
a five percent Advantage for our Gen 5
SSD but there was no difference in actual frame rate and that five percent
was just not something we could actually notice in Final Fantasy end Walker we
did see a 14 Improvement in load times which is cool but it's a far cry from
the 40 Improvement that these drives showed in synthetic benchmarks like
Crystal disk marks you know what maybe we should just do a
big file transfer in Windows I mean we say it all the time you know these
sequential drives at least they're good for big file transfers let's do some big
files all right yeah this is going to go really fast probably so
six gigabytes a second five gigabytes a
second four and a half gigabytes a second I mean
that's pretty fast 4.2 gigabytes a second but that's that's
really fast maybe the fastest I've ever seen we seem to have hit some sort of
file explorer or bottleneck here at about four gigabytes a second
but here's the thing even if Windows Explorer didn't come up against its own
software limitations when performance is this fast it can only last for so long
running our new drives in iometer free
of Windows File Explorer we've slammed them for 15 minutes of continuous
activity and saw our speeds fall precipitously in less than a minute down
to about three gigabytes a second what's going on here you might ask is it
thermal throttling the answer is no with either the heatsink on the drive or the
integrated heat spreader on your motherboard these drives stay well
within their thermal limits what did happen though is we overwhelmed the cash
on our Drive pretty much all modern drives store more than one bit per cell
which gives them more capacity but comes at the cost of performance and Longevity
but here's the thing many drives especially performance ones can operate
that multi-bit per cell nand in a kind of pseudo SLC mode so it's kind of like
switching over a segment of the storage to go much faster but at the cost of
capacity once the drive has filled up that low capacity cache it starts
running at much slower TLC Nan speeds
then when that is nearly full we move to
what's called a folding state where the drive runs at a distinctly unimpressive
one to one and a half gigabytes per second basically it's bottlenecked by
being forced to rearrange data on the Fly while it's operating rather than
being allowed to perform these operations in the background while you aren't using it which if you remember
from our airplane analogy is pretty
inefficient lo and behold the 990 Pro
suffers the exact same fate even coming in at similar sustained numbers wait a
second that's because despite the impressively dense new nand on the t700
it's not actually faster than the nand
flash from Top tier Gen 4 drives like the 990 Pro bummer
to be clear this only happens when you're moving incredibly large files and
it doesn't reflect typical use most of the time you're doing those random reads
and writes that can easily be handled by the high speed cache which is actually
an even bigger problem for the marketing teams who are tasked with selling these
drives if the sequential numbers aren't sustainable and the Gen 5 interface is
ludicrously overkill for the more random workloads that we encounter on a daily
basis what is the point of this thing okay
it's possible that you're a power user with numerous virtual machines or Docker
containers you could have some use for this but honestly I think even that is
kind of missing the point of what makes PCIe Gen 5 drives so exciting the real
exciting part is not necessarily this drive or even the current PCIe gen 5
crop of platforms but rather The
increased expansion that could be available to us in the future
thanks to gen 5's faster per Lane data
rates we could in theory get the same performance from our drives as last gen
or gpus or network cards using half as
many lanes like think about a ryzen 5000 system you got your GPU that 16 lanes
you've got your single m.2 storage drive that's another four and then you're
sitting there going hmm I need more storage why don't I add a second m.2
Drive well when you go to add that second Drive instead of running off the PCIe
lanes that are directly wired into the CPU you're going to be running off lanes
that are going through the motherboard chipset which is fine but the more
drives you want to add the more potential there's going to be for
bottlenecks unless you want to fall back to slower SATA drives now workstation
class CPUs do exist with much greater PCIe connectivity but they're also
significantly more expensive with PCIe Gen 5 on the other hand well we get
double the performance with the same number of lanes or the same performance
using half as many lanes so suddenly you
could have two drives out of more than ample eight gigabytes a second with nice
low latency connections directly to the CPU personally I'd actually like to see
us go all the way down to a single Lane Drive at four gigabytes a second and
then I could have four of them sick now in practice it's not that simple
nothing ever is but think about it this could be a very interesting path for the
industry to follow and in fact we're already seeing it in the server space
now you might be wondering why not just
make more Lanes instead of trying to make the lanes faster well the thing is
that more Lanes means more pins are needed to connect them and more pins
means more complexity and more complexity means higher costs so while
I'm a little disappointed to find out that there is no clear benefit to this
thing for the average gamer hey at least
we can have fun with them right see big numbers uh why don't we raid zero these
drives see how fast they go hey hey raid zero is a valid
configuration David oh my God are you actually using Windows Drive manager to
really use storage space just do it I don't care we just got to get this guy
in here this is ridiculous well there's two in here now you're booted on we have
to format it into a drive and then are these hot spots uh PCIe is not hot
chocolate yes it is it is well not on consumer platforms I'm shutting it down
how many of these can you fit in there in the tech I thought you were gonna ask how many I could fit in my butt oh I was
gonna ask about your Tech sack did you try this and it's really fast
yes neat well it failed when I tried to create it so that's cool
um and just like if we were running a single Drive
um other bottlenecks would stop us before we'd get anywhere near this kind
of performance in the real world so as our testing is shown today it's
not really the speed that matters at least not today the real benefits of
PCIe Gen 5 are more about flexibility
and I guess being ready for whatever the future might bring and whatever segue I
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honey badger Den a truly fast SSD array
that we actually do use in our editing day right over there
yep that's right I mean it's not in there it's in the server room but but they use it every day to not nearly its
full potential just like this oh crap