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Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9306
Posted: 07:05am 08 Mar 2024
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I needed a 1TB SSD in NVMe flavour for someone's upgrade, and was surprised to find - when it arrived - that it only uses ONE flash-memory chip now!
The last time I bought a 1TB M.2, it had EIGHT chips on it - four top, four bottom. This new one drops SEVEN CHIPS for ONE.
BGA chip on the right, is the 1TB. There is a controller chip(upper-left), and what APPEARS to be a super-fast SDRAM chip at lower-left, which can buffer data at super fast speed, before committing it to the flash chip on the right.
This would seem to be the case, cos this NVMe is a WD Green series, so in order to save power and performance, you get a cheaper device.
You can write to this thing at OVER 300MB/s on a USB3 connection, up until what I THINK is going on - you fill up the SDRAM buffer - then the write speed drops down to 100MB/s.
That's my theory, anyway, and for sporadic OS use, and not moving 100's of GB of data, that is fine. Want better performance? Buy the more expensive WD blue-series.
Still, I find this impressive at an electronics level. You now have what is effectively a SATA controller, multi-GB buffer RAM, and the main storage medium - in three chips total.
If you go back to the 80's, the IDE controller for a HDD, was a separate ISA card by itself, absolutely covered in chips - and that was JUST the controller, to say nothing of the HDD you then connected to that card.
A little respect to development.....Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!
mclout999 Guru Joined: 05/07/2020 Location: United StatesPosts: 469
Posted: 03:23pm 08 Mar 2024
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My Steam Deck 1TB and 2TB 2230 NVMEs(about a postage stamp in size) Gen3 are one chip that includes the controller embedded. On the M.2 port, they get about 3200mbps and in a USB C 10mbps enclosure, it runs at about the theoretical limit of 1000mbps. The system drives in my gaming PC are Samsung Gen 4s that run about 7000mbps. I remember thinking how amazing my first MFM HDD was when I got it. My first HDD was for my TRS-80 Model I. It was an 8" monster that took up a desktop and was a whopping 5 MB. It's controller BOX was much larger than the Model I. I ran a BBS on it over a 300-baud modem. At every new step forward I was amazed at the technology and that is why I love computing technology for its own sake.
EDIT: It was bugging the hell out of me that I could not remember the type of HDD I had for the Model I. It was a "Winchester" drive. Edited 2024-03-09 02:16 by mclout999
Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9306
Posted: 10:55pm 08 Mar 2024
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Impressive! Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!
Bryan1 Guru Joined: 22/02/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1344
Posted: 12:27am 09 Mar 2024
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yea up this week I had never heard of these so I just had to go look at that laptop I bought and yes it does have a 500 gig NVME HD installed, not bad for a laptop brought out in '18 I reckon...
Cheers Bryan
Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9306
Posted: 04:02am 09 Mar 2024
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I expect 2.5" SATA SSD's to be around for a wee while yet, BUT - most motherboard manufacturers, NUC and laptop designers, have moved to M.2 drives cos they are so much smaller and easier to design into a product. That and the NVMe flavours are even faster then the fastest SATA drives, so....Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!
Notice. New forum software under development. It's going to miss a few functions and look a bit ugly for a while, but I'm working on it full time now as the old forum was too unstable. Couple days, all good. If you notice any issues, please contact me.
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