What? Are you stuck 5+ years back? There's plenty of roomy, affordable drives that can hold plenty of games out there. I didn't figure AnandTech was a retirement home; some of the thinking on here is so dated.
At this point you need to stay updated on whether an HDD is a functional option, even for single-player games. With texture detail being what it is at this point, SSD's can be a system requirement for ultra settings if the game streams textures.
Before the price spike I purchased a 1 tb SSD for $200. Between that and my primary drive having 512 gb of storage, I have more than enough space for all the games I play...and I have over 700 games in my steam library.
Fortunately you can still find plenty of excellent, new, MLC 1TB SSD's for $200.
Sandisk Cloudspeed ECO and Mushkin Reactor come to mind. You can land used M500's and MX100's for even less and they are very reliable even with many many drive writes.
So does this require special software/drivers or is all the caching management handled in hardware and the whole card just appears as a single standard storage drive to the OS?
I don't think that this will make it to market. First of, the gaming crowd is being courted a caching scheme directly form Intel in the form of Optane (which is also lack luster in my eye). Secondly, there will need to be some sort of caching software layer for this thing to work. Not impossible to pull off but likely the reason why they're already indicating that this would be a 2018 product. Testing and validation of something like this is going to be time consuming.
I do support the introduction of PCIe carrier cards for multiple NVMe drives, preferably behind a PCIe bridge chip. Even better would be a six M.2 cards behind a bridge chips that also does RAID5/6 acceleration. For anything close to this has been tied to OEM workstations (HP, Dell, Lenovo) at a significant price premium.
This is actually quite interesting. I wouldn't use it for "gaming", because doh, but rather for a high speed VM storage just as an example. Of course I could achieve the same without this product but this is a nice, self contained solution. Assuming it's just mostly hardware without need for special software and/or drivers e.g. it presents itself as an xTB drive to the OS with the caching happening automagically.
I much prefer a software solution since it's easier to tune for my workload than a hardware blackbox. Only interesting thing is the power loss protection, arguably that should be a feature of the drives anyways though.
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lmcd - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
This looks cool, but I can't say I'd buy it. I'm fine with most of my single-player games using cold HDD storage.beginner99 - Sunday, June 4, 2017 - link
Yeah. Games are just fine running on HDD. Loading times are longer but that's ok. SSD still are too expensive to store 50GB+ games on them.CheapSushi - Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - link
What? Are you stuck 5+ years back? There's plenty of roomy, affordable drives that can hold plenty of games out there. I didn't figure AnandTech was a retirement home; some of the thinking on here is so dated.CheapSushi - Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - link
Thanks for the reminder than AnandTech doesn't actually have enthusiasts reading anymore.Dizoja86 - Thursday, June 8, 2017 - link
At this point you need to stay updated on whether an HDD is a functional option, even for single-player games. With texture detail being what it is at this point, SSD's can be a system requirement for ultra settings if the game streams textures.eek2121 - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
Before the price spike I purchased a 1 tb SSD for $200. Between that and my primary drive having 512 gb of storage, I have more than enough space for all the games I play...and I have over 700 games in my steam library.cosmotic - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
That's cool.Samus - Sunday, June 4, 2017 - link
Fortunately you can still find plenty of excellent, new, MLC 1TB SSD's for $200.Sandisk Cloudspeed ECO and Mushkin Reactor come to mind. You can land used M500's and MX100's for even less and they are very reliable even with many many drive writes.
ltcommanderdata - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
So does this require special software/drivers or is all the caching management handled in hardware and the whole card just appears as a single standard storage drive to the OS?HomeworldFound - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
They're probably only expecting to sell five of them, so I doubt anyone knows.cosmotic - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
"Unlimited speed"Zak - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
They must have hired former Verizon or AT&T PR people.Zak - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
Looks like a solution in a bad need of a problem. But it's "Gaming" and has lights so some dumbass will buy it and claim major FPS increase, oh well.LancerVI - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
Well. I can see it used in cases where drive storage is limited. The ability to put several drives in such a small space could be useful.LancerVI - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
EDIT:I mean in a physical case of course, with not a lot of drive bays.
CheapSushi - Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - link
I bet you're the type of guy that send for years that RAM speed didn't matter and SSDs were a waste of money.CheapSushi - Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - link
*saidjjj - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
4xM.2 would be more fun and bundled with X299 and X399 mobos.M.2 as cache is of no use really and not justifying the costs.
Kevin G - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
I don't think that this will make it to market. First of, the gaming crowd is being courted a caching scheme directly form Intel in the form of Optane (which is also lack luster in my eye). Secondly, there will need to be some sort of caching software layer for this thing to work. Not impossible to pull off but likely the reason why they're already indicating that this would be a 2018 product. Testing and validation of something like this is going to be time consuming.I do support the introduction of PCIe carrier cards for multiple NVMe drives, preferably behind a PCIe bridge chip. Even better would be a six M.2 cards behind a bridge chips that also does RAID5/6 acceleration. For anything close to this has been tied to OEM workstations (HP, Dell, Lenovo) at a significant price premium.
lagittaja - Sunday, June 4, 2017 - link
This is actually quite interesting. I wouldn't use it for "gaming", because doh, but rather for a high speed VM storage just as an example.Of course I could achieve the same without this product but this is a nice, self contained solution. Assuming it's just mostly hardware without need for special software and/or drivers e.g. it presents itself as an xTB drive to the OS with the caching happening automagically.
nils_ - Thursday, June 8, 2017 - link
I much prefer a software solution since it's easier to tune for my workload than a hardware blackbox. Only interesting thing is the power loss protection, arguably that should be a feature of the drives anyways though.joex4444 - Thursday, June 8, 2017 - link
Physically x16, but the ad say it has a PCIe x8 interface. Thanks for wasting 8 lanes, morons.