Is it possible that the write speed of your drive really is down in the 800MB/s range? Earlier you said it seemed to start there then ramp up. Was that observed only with benchmarking tools (which can act odd) or with actual data? If you haven’t, maybe you could copy a bunch of stuff to it from the Mac Studio internal drive so that there is no bottleneck. I’d suggest a folder full of photos and/or videos. That would be the most like my workload.
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MP All Models Bootable PCI SSD Cards/Drives for Mac Pro (NVMe M.2, U.2, EDSFF E3.S, etc.)
- Thread starter ZombiePhysicist
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I was downloading data from a camera drive to it at 800MBps while using the same drive as both a read and write target for transcodes and it was running about 120FPS with arri footage, ballpark that's about 2GBps of data going back and forth.
I see. Would you be willing to try the test I suggested? Basically just put a big folder of video footage on the internal drive, then copy it to the Solidigm with nothing else going on, and timing the transfer. What you were doing is fairly complex and I’m not sure it really represents the write speed the drive is capable of. If you’re not able to do this or simply don’t have the time, I certainly understand.
Thanks. I went ahead and ordered the D5-P5336 61TB, for better or worse. I should have it tomorrow. So, while I think it might be nice for the world to know about your drive too, you can probably hold off testing it unless you just feel like it. Hopefully by tomorrow night I’ll have mine tested and results posted here.
Got the drive, used Solidigm Storage Tool 1.13 on a Windows box to update the firmware to 5CV10302 (not sure if that matters at all, but I always update firmware to the latest), took it home, put it in the Sonnet Echo Express SE IIIe that I already own (on a "dumb" StarTech card that simply maps the signals on the U.2 connector to a PCIe x4 connector), hooked it to my M2 Max Mac Studio, formatted it APFS named "One Disk To Rule Them All" (you have to have fun; I won't leave it like that), and proceeded to test.
First thing I did was copy a folder of JPEGs and NEFs (Nikon raw files) from the internal boot drive to the Solidigm. The folder was 151GB and it copied in 63s, meaning 2.4GB/s. There did not seem to be any visual slowdown at any part of the copy, meaning (to me at least) that there is no cache filling up and then the copy slows down after that, such as what I observed on a Samsung 8TB QLC SATA drive a while back. Then I rebooted the computer (to make sure no files were cached anywhere) and did the same copy in reverse, to measure the read speed of the drive. Exactly the same time: 63s. So I'm guessing that both read and write are limited by the speed of Thunderbolt. But I couldn't care less: to me, this is absolutely fantastic speed, and more than fast enough!
Below are the results from Black Magic and AJA. Both matched my measured speed exactly for write, but read was oddly a little less in both.
Now I'll just leave the computer overnight to see if it manages not to panic. If not, I think this drive is officially what I've been looking for for a long time.
First thing I did was copy a folder of JPEGs and NEFs (Nikon raw files) from the internal boot drive to the Solidigm. The folder was 151GB and it copied in 63s, meaning 2.4GB/s. There did not seem to be any visual slowdown at any part of the copy, meaning (to me at least) that there is no cache filling up and then the copy slows down after that, such as what I observed on a Samsung 8TB QLC SATA drive a while back. Then I rebooted the computer (to make sure no files were cached anywhere) and did the same copy in reverse, to measure the read speed of the drive. Exactly the same time: 63s. So I'm guessing that both read and write are limited by the speed of Thunderbolt. But I couldn't care less: to me, this is absolutely fantastic speed, and more than fast enough!
Below are the results from Black Magic and AJA. Both matched my measured speed exactly for write, but read was oddly a little less in both.
Now I'll just leave the computer overnight to see if it manages not to panic. If not, I think this drive is officially what I've been looking for for a long time.
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Still good in the morning! Houston, we have a winner. I will not even bore everyone with the complex drive systems that this one drive (to rule them all) will replace but I'm quite amazed. Now I need to finance it by selling the bunch of 9300 Pro 15TB drives I have...
Are you going to move it internally in your 2023 Mac Pro, or keep it working via thunderbolt?
I don’t own an M2 Mac Pro now. I did have one at one point, because I wanted to load it up with 9300 Pros, but sold it due to the instability. So the Studio is my main machine.
Samsung quietly launches 61.44TB SSD, talks about a 122.88TB model
One of the world's highest-capacity SSDs has been released without fanfare.
www.tomshardware.com
It probably wont work with macOS, but more competition in the larger size space is good.
Fascinating, captain. As for me, I’m all set. My lovely 61TB drive is now home to every photo and video I’ve ever taken, totaling about 40TB. No hiccups, perfect performance. Highly recommended for Mac users. Sonnet needs to add it to their list.Samsung quietly launches 61.44TB SSD, talks about a 122.88TB model
One of the world's highest-capacity SSDs has been released without fanfare.
It probably wont work with macOS, but more competition in the larger size space is good.
Thanks again, ZombiePhysicist, et. al.
The quest has just begun!
I hope to find full PCIe5 speed drives that are 60+TB that we could use. Imagine 14000MB/sec throughput!
I want to believe!
At the risk of sounding like Bill Gates (*) from many years ago (640K ought to be enough for anybody)… this drive ought to be enough for me at least until the warranty runs out in five years. It really only needs write speeds as fast as the media I’m copying from (CFexpress cards) and read speeds fast enough to make playback of any stored videos seamless, and to not slow down backups. It does all that very easily and holds everything I need it to and is tiny. And I assume reliable. And silent. (And expensive!) But sure… faster is always better, all other things being equal.The quest has just begun!
I hope to find full PCIe5 speed drives that are 60+TB that we could use. Imagine 14000MB/sec throughput!
I want to believe!
(*) Apparently Bill Gates may not have said this. But I’m going to keep “quoting” him anyway.
Speaking of pcie5 drives:
www.techradar.com
Another storage vendor wants to launch a 30.72TB SSD in 2024 and it's one worth looking at — Phison unveils Pascari X200 in plans to compete with its own data center clients
Other specialized SSDs are on their way
www.techradar.com