• Thrashy@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    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.

    • Gg901@lemmy.world
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      19 days ago

      Why was Optane so good with random access? Why did Intel abandon the tech?

      • rice@lemmy.org
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        19 days ago

        didn’t sell well. I assume if they were able to combine it with todays need for NVRAM on a GPU for AI they would have gotten it sold a bunch. I am surprised we don’t see “pcie ram expansion pack” for the GPUs from nvidia yet

        This is all a lot easier created than it is to make the software for

    • SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org
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      19 days ago

      Not to forget that I’d be very cautious about the stratosferic claims of a never heard before chinese manufacturer…