What others said, but it *is* amazing corporate energy that they settled on branding that was neither independent (Solidigm 680p, continuing the old Intel numbering) or consistent (Hynix P41 Plus, since it slots in beneath the other Hynix P41s), instead mixing them together in a way that I'm sure made enough sense to folks in the meeting but is opaque to buyers.
I am not. This is for very specific use cases and not aimed at general computing. Of course, if your workload fits among those, then more power to you. But I doubt we'll see it in the desktop space. And it will be expensive, because it will not be manufactures in sufficiently high volume. Damn, Intel even scrapped Optane which was awesome but apprently couldn't make it profitable.
Best case scenario, we get to play with it in 5-7 years on decomissioned servers sold on eBay.
I get how it ends up like this, but boy, a proprietary driver for one SSD and one OS is not a great way to add the smart-read-caching feature. You either make the controller do more work to track hot blocks or (hard now, but long-term promising) properly extend NVMe so any OS/SSD brand pair could have similar functionality, and the software can evolve more independently of the hardware.
TLC and QLC were always wrong anyway, they're not putting triple or quad levels in the cell. They're putting 8 or 16 levels, to store 3 or 4 bits.
It's easy to think "Oh, sure, you could distinguish between 4 states", but properly phrasing it as 16 states more accurately expresses the difficult problem that the poor drive is forced to navigate.
I'd love a deep-dive on exactly what error-correction is happening inside these things. I've always been advised that the name-brand SD cards are superior "because the big brands can afford to license the good error-correction IP", but I've never seen details and I strongly suggest that could just be marketing fluff. But regardless, it's relevant on SSDs too, ever more so with higher numbers of charge-levels being stored per cell, and commensurately skyrocketing bit error rates on the underlying medium.
What's powered-off data retention like? For some of us that might be relevant. How often does the drive scrub itself when it's powered-on? What are the final uncorrected BER specs like, and does anyone ever perform independent validation of those claims?
These are hard questions to answer, otherwise I'd answer them myself. But it's something I'd hope industry journalists are looking into.
I actually read some papers from manufacturers to try and figure this out. The problem is, the variables needed to calculate the result come from the NAND manufacturer. So, We have no way of knowing without their help.
Nothing wrong with QLC, is perfectly fine for its intended usecases and unless you're a dilletante you're not going to buy one of these for a non-intended usecase.
QLC would be fine for mass storage, but they (collective and possibly colluding "they") seem to want to charge a premium for trash NAND drives. I'm not playing $500+ for a 4TB QLC drive for example. Now $400 for a 4TB TLC with DRAM cache; maybe we can talk.
No-one's making you pay $500 for a 4TB QLC drive. A 4TB QVO 370 (very nice drive for, say, a media center) costs $388 on AMZ. If you want to go to less stellar brands, WD will sell you the same thing for $359 and Crucial for $349.
Right now you CAN get a 870 EVO for only $10 more, and honestly, I'd snap that up! It looks like it's clearance of some sort because that it a really good price! But the normal situation is that the EVO (TLC) would cost about $50 more, and that $50 is just not worth it for many reasonable use cases. And sure, maybe the drive will only last 10 years. SO FSCKING WHAT? In 10 years I'll be buying drives that are 32TB in size, and a 4TB drive will just be a small irritation that's not too useful. I have a few 250GB drives that are still alive from around 2000 and honestly I wish the damn things would die so I can throw them away without feeling guilty.
Time passes, drives get smaller relative to use cases, and an old drive is problematic because its size is just inconvenient.
QLC is perfectly fine for many use cases, like storing audio and movies, or backup. If you don't want to use it, buy something better. But don't make silly statements.
QLC is terrible for backups, and mass storage in general, as once it begins to fill up it is slower then traditional HDDS. 7200 RPM disks like the seagate ironwolf are 4-5x faster when backing up large quantities of data. Read data is also harshly impacted once the storage fills up.
QLC is garbage designed to milk uninformed consumers of their cash.
People are probably concerned about QLC becoming the only NAND storage available. A lot of consumers feared TLC would replace MLC and SLC flash, leaving us with poor endurance and lower performance in the name of increasing profits for producers - which, in fact, really did happen. Significant numbers of people defended TLC by making statements similar to yours, yet here we are. Thus, others are probably rightfully concerned about QLC turning into the only consumer-grade storage option at some point in the future when history repeats.
IMHO, in a typical end user environment, using QLC isn't that big of an issue as long as the SLC is large enough . TLC isn't much better than QLC. Those write speeds quoted on specs and in benchmarks are not the actual TC write speed. ITs on its SLC cache. Once the write size exceeds the cache, we see speeds of ~1GB/s (some even less than that).
Endurance wise, its not that big of an issue as well. IF you need to rewrite the drive so many times that its worn out, you need a bigger drive instead. Note that I am talking about typical end-user environment.
So, the real downisde? The price!! Till today, we don't see a reasonable price difference between QLC and TLC. Why should we spend similar amount of money for QLC when TLC cost almost the same?
Remember when you bought your last SSD and had to install software and a service to make it work?
No?
Me either.
People who buy budget SSDs let Windows install drivers and that's it. Installing extra software for hardware these days is done by people who have spent good money on their device, so basically GPUs and that's it.
Funny they make a short drive for OEMs that won't have to use the computers they build.
Looks like this drive will perform well in the store when it hasn't been used much (it will mostly use the SLC) but once you use it for a few months and the drive fills up performance will drop drastically. Like many of Intel's hare-brained schemes (i3 processors with only 16 pci lanes) is another way to generate e-Waste.
The world absolutely needs more trash-tier QLC NAND around! I'm very excited to see what else we can scrape off the bottom of the storage barrel and bury inside made-to-fail computing devices in the coming years.
Every time I can I buy the leftovers from Intel's run of MLC drives. I mean... didn't they buy Intel's fab? I cringe when I have to buy TLC. Now they try to shove QLC down people's throats. Like others have said, reliability will be ethereal.
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shabby - Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - link
Those are some pretty slides... now let's see how it performs and the price to justify this marketing piece.AJL - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
Or, you could actually read the 'closing thoughts' b/4 you post and stop whining.shabby - Thursday, August 4, 2022 - link
I'm whining because this advertisement is an article on the main page with no useful info. If this was part of the review, sure, but it's not.Samus - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link
Am I whining too because they are hyping this thing without even disclosing an MSRP?Lbibass - Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - link
It's too bad that there's ALREADY A P41 SSD. From a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MANUFACTURER.This will cause nothing but confusion in the market.
29a - Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - link
We know who didn't read the article.meacupla - Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - link
Solidigm is a subsidiary of SK hynix.twotwotwo - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
What others said, but it *is* amazing corporate energy that they settled on branding that was neither independent (Solidigm 680p, continuing the old Intel numbering) or consistent (Hynix P41 Plus, since it slots in beneath the other Hynix P41s), instead mixing them together in a way that I'm sure made enough sense to folks in the meeting but is opaque to buyers.andychow - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
I'm sure it's well thought-out. Any buyer looking only at the listing would see the P41 Plus with a more recent release date as an upgrade to the P41.Threska - Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - link
Waiting for when computation comes to memory and storage.https://hazelcast.com/glossary/in-memory-computati...
kobblestown - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link
I am not. This is for very specific use cases and not aimed at general computing. Of course, if your workload fits among those, then more power to you. But I doubt we'll see it in the desktop space. And it will be expensive, because it will not be manufactures in sufficiently high volume. Damn, Intel even scrapped Optane which was awesome but apprently couldn't make it profitable.Best case scenario, we get to play with it in 5-7 years on decomissioned servers sold on eBay.
twotwotwo - Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - link
I get how it ends up like this, but boy, a proprietary driver for one SSD and one OS is not a great way to add the smart-read-caching feature. You either make the controller do more work to track hot blocks or (hard now, but long-term promising) properly extend NVMe so any OS/SSD brand pair could have similar functionality, and the software can evolve more independently of the hardware.Tams80 - Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - link
QLC though.TLC was pushing it. This QLC stuff just seems like asking for trouble in a few years.
Ashinjuka - Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - link
using QLC, a more accurate name for this item would be P41 Minusballsystemlord - Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - link
I like the new name.myself248 - Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - link
TLC and QLC were always wrong anyway, they're not putting triple or quad levels in the cell. They're putting 8 or 16 levels, to store 3 or 4 bits.It's easy to think "Oh, sure, you could distinguish between 4 states", but properly phrasing it as 16 states more accurately expresses the difficult problem that the poor drive is forced to navigate.
I'd love a deep-dive on exactly what error-correction is happening inside these things. I've always been advised that the name-brand SD cards are superior "because the big brands can afford to license the good error-correction IP", but I've never seen details and I strongly suggest that could just be marketing fluff. But regardless, it's relevant on SSDs too, ever more so with higher numbers of charge-levels being stored per cell, and commensurately skyrocketing bit error rates on the underlying medium.
What's powered-off data retention like? For some of us that might be relevant. How often does the drive scrub itself when it's powered-on? What are the final uncorrected BER specs like, and does anyone ever perform independent validation of those claims?
These are hard questions to answer, otherwise I'd answer them myself. But it's something I'd hope industry journalists are looking into.
ballsystemlord - Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - link
> What's powered-off data retention like?I actually read some papers from manufacturers to try and figure this out. The problem is, the variables needed to calculate the result come from the NAND manufacturer. So, We have no way of knowing without their help.
Kvaern1 - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
It's almost like you have no idea what "budget drive" means...TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
"budget" doesnt justify garbage, and QLC is utter garbage.Kvaern1 - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link
Nothing wrong with QLC, is perfectly fine for its intended usecases and unless you're a dilletante you're not going to buy one of these for a non-intended usecase.Golgatha777 - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
QLC would be fine for mass storage, but they (collective and possibly colluding "they") seem to want to charge a premium for trash NAND drives. I'm not playing $500+ for a 4TB QLC drive for example. Now $400 for a 4TB TLC with DRAM cache; maybe we can talk.name99 - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
No-one's making you pay $500 for a 4TB QLC drive.A 4TB QVO 370 (very nice drive for, say, a media center) costs $388 on AMZ.
If you want to go to less stellar brands, WD will sell you the same thing for $359 and Crucial for $349.
Right now you CAN get a 870 EVO for only $10 more, and honestly, I'd snap that up! It looks like it's clearance of some sort because that it a really good price! But the normal situation is that the EVO (TLC) would cost about $50 more, and that $50 is just not worth it for many reasonable use cases.
And sure, maybe the drive will only last 10 years. SO FSCKING WHAT? In 10 years I'll be buying drives that are 32TB in size, and a 4TB drive will just be a small irritation that's not too useful.
I have a few 250GB drives that are still alive from around 2000 and honestly I wish the damn things would die so I can throw them away without feeling guilty.
Time passes, drives get smaller relative to use cases, and an old drive is problematic because its size is just inconvenient.
TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
Oh so not $500, but $388 for an even worse drive with worse performance. Great, what a deal!name99 - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
QLC is perfectly fine for many use cases, like storing audio and movies, or backup.If you don't want to use it, buy something better. But don't make silly statements.
TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
QLC is terrible for backups, and mass storage in general, as once it begins to fill up it is slower then traditional HDDS. 7200 RPM disks like the seagate ironwolf are 4-5x faster when backing up large quantities of data. Read data is also harshly impacted once the storage fills up.QLC is garbage designed to milk uninformed consumers of their cash.
PeachNCream - Sunday, August 7, 2022 - link
People are probably concerned about QLC becoming the only NAND storage available. A lot of consumers feared TLC would replace MLC and SLC flash, leaving us with poor endurance and lower performance in the name of increasing profits for producers - which, in fact, really did happen. Significant numbers of people defended TLC by making statements similar to yours, yet here we are. Thus, others are probably rightfully concerned about QLC turning into the only consumer-grade storage option at some point in the future when history repeats.escksu - Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - link
IMHO, in a typical end user environment, using QLC isn't that big of an issue as long as the SLC is large enough . TLC isn't much better than QLC. Those write speeds quoted on specs and in benchmarks are not the actual TC write speed. ITs on its SLC cache. Once the write size exceeds the cache, we see speeds of ~1GB/s (some even less than that).Endurance wise, its not that big of an issue as well. IF you need to rewrite the drive so many times that its worn out, you need a bigger drive instead. Note that I am talking about typical end-user environment.
So, the real downisde? The price!! Till today, we don't see a reasonable price difference between QLC and TLC. Why should we spend similar amount of money for QLC when TLC cost almost the same?
chrcoluk - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
The best TLC SSDs can write at speeds close to 2GB/sec, so there is a big gap between QLC and TLC currently.TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
TLC drives lose only a small fraction of the performance QLC loses when the drive fills up/cache runs out. Nothing like QLC hitting under 100MB/sballsystemlord - Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - link
Notice how they say it is a "budget" drive, but don't have a price yet.shabby - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
It'll be $10 cheaper then equivalent tlc drive...ballsystemlord - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
Upvote!Danvelopment - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
Remember when you bought your last SSD and had to install software and a service to make it work?No?
Me either.
People who buy budget SSDs let Windows install drivers and that's it. Installing extra software for hardware these days is done by people who have spent good money on their device, so basically GPUs and that's it.
hanselltc - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
Souring the p41 name yikesPaulHoule - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
Funny they make a short drive for OEMs that won't have to use the computers they build.Looks like this drive will perform well in the store when it hasn't been used much (it will mostly use the SLC) but once you use it for a few months and the drive fills up performance will drop drastically. Like many of Intel's hare-brained schemes (i3 processors with only 16 pci lanes) is another way to generate e-Waste.
PeachNCream - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
The world absolutely needs more trash-tier QLC NAND around! I'm very excited to see what else we can scrape off the bottom of the storage barrel and bury inside made-to-fail computing devices in the coming years.Oxford Guy - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link
PLC for everyone!nandnandnand - Wednesday, August 10, 2022 - link
OLC or bust.xaneo - Wednesday, August 3, 2022 - link
QLC...Every time I can I buy the leftovers from Intel's run of MLC drives. I mean... didn't they buy Intel's fab? I cringe when I have to buy TLC. Now they try to shove QLC down people's throats. Like others have said, reliability will be ethereal.
fluffo25 - Sunday, August 7, 2022 - link
wow, the guy who collected that performance data must be really good at his job!!![email protected] - Friday, August 12, 2022 - link
TBW a few years ago was 1200. Then 800. Then 600. Now it is 400.DPUser - Saturday, August 20, 2022 - link
Solidigm should allow users to select how they want the drive to store data... an "All SLC" Mode might be something fun.[email protected] - Tuesday, August 23, 2022 - link
Here is a 2TB with similar price/performance and yet has twice the TBW.https://www.amazon.com/Inland-Performance-Internal...