My 660p and 670p drives have served me well. Bought another p41 plus after watching this. Definitely will recommend to friends and coworkers. But you need 4TB drives!
This reminds me of how Broadcom got started with their NICs in the early 2000's.... also herding the cats is a fantastic analogy that I myself have used for years...
I recently built a 7800X3D system with Solidigm P44Pro 2TB drive as the main OS drive. I was going to pickup WD850X, but then came across Solidigm P44Pro, and it was right up there with the best of the best, and it turned out to be a Hynix own (old Intel) brand. I will be trying out this new driver/software for my P44 Pro later tonight. I hope this is safe to use on existing drives and does not cause any drive wipes/resets and data loss.
Installing the driver should have no impact on the existing contents of the drive. That said, everyone should have an up-to-date backup before doing more drastic things like firmware updates, etc.
You had me excited when you said it's the former Optane division and then my interest sort of dropped off a cliff when you immediately said it's NAND flash.
Pretty sure only Intel and Micron has access to Optane/3D-XPoint IP. Don’t think former engineers could just walk off with that stuff and do it elsewhere. 😅
@@kurousagi1339 Very true but I guess I was hoping maybe they had a different storage breakthrough that operated on similar principles but had better material properties. This is very much just an SLC cache in place of a DRAM cache with some sophisticated mechanisms in the driver. Which yes, that's cool and all, maybe a _little_ more novel, but isn't automatic over every OS stack and still fundamentally operates over the limits of the flash. There's only so much that caching can do for you. And on the side of writes, Optane is pretty unparalleled. Having something flush to stable storage reliably and fast (faster than what SLC flash can do) is what makes Optane a perfect fit for a write cache, dedicated intent log, journal, or anything other trick enabled by the file system to reduce the latency of a write. The fast SLC cache here just basically makes it at best what those STEC writezilla devices could and at worst, a crappier form of that because it may require software in between to quickly sync those writes. Don't get me wrong, that's not Optane's only benefit and I'm not completely opposed to having a software assisted mechanism that works in tandem with the firmware, it's just there are a lot of places that can go wrong. Even getting all of those details right over Illumos, FreeBSD, Linux, OS X and Windows (and that might be a big ask, given how well even host assisted SMR went), this isn't super exciting for me.
I have a surprisingly long-lived WD black in a tiered storage setup for games (I tend to play one or two games to completion before picking up another one so I don't see many slowdowns) but once I'm due for an upgrade I might finally go all SSD.
Just got one question - is the software for the SSD available outside of Windows? I only ask this because if Solidigm wanted to sell a bunch of these devices, they should have something available through Flatpak for the Steam Deck users with a 2230 formfactor so that they have a "Solid" option that's not by Kioxia.
Hey Wendel, and Allen for that matter, do you think Solidigm will pick up Optane seeing as Intel has abandoned it? Or does Intel have a rigor mortis death grip on that intellectual property.
It's not about the IP, it's about the viability of the technology. After manufacturing, they realized that the price is higher than SSD, faster but not as high capacity, but slower than RAM but with higher capacity but not as well integrated as RAM in many systems, requiring some sort of CPU support and platform support. So it's in a no man's land.
Now I'm really curious if that dynamic queue assignment ends up being a boon in all these games that have a bunch of traversal stutter, especially the UE4 ones that are basically pegging one main game thread and one render thread. I poked around a bit with the Dead Space remake and found that the length of the longest frame time spike correlated with how fast a drive it was loading from. Don't go as far as a USB HDD though, because you'll just end up with holes in the world when the reads time out and never get retried. :)
I've used nothing but Intel/Solidigm professional/enterprise-class SSD's since my first SSD about a decade ago. Even the oldest ones are still functioning today, rated at 100% health, with 97-98%% TBW endurance left on them still. I purchased my first M.2 drive this year for a new 2024 build & went with the Solidigm/Intel P44 Pro 2TB M.2 2280 NVMe.
Good video, very informative. One question: When you use a filesystem like ZFS having its own prefetch policies, how it compares against doing it at driver level (which doesn't now about discontinous file extents, it just knows about consecutive blocks...)? Is it counter productive if both are tryng to achieve their own prefetch or are they somehow complementary ?
It shouldn’t interfere since ZFS would typically be on a Linux system and our driver is Windows only. The prefetching concepts are similar for both cases though.
@@malventano Allyn how's the Linux driver going? is the configuration exposed with a GUI as on the Windows counterpart.. don't forget to feed the Linux village, they're a significant and loyal bunch ;)
Ooooo, time to keep Solidigm on my watchlist. This is awesome! And ya on the game dev side of things, for larger games with engines that deal with groups of entities for effiency, lets say on the CPU cache, it makes sense to see those large sequentials. I could only imagine how much more performance could happen. Then again, it's another thing that devs have to make sure to design it that way, just like making a game multithreaded.
Well, since I had a trucker as a customer for High End Netgear NAS server asking for support (was working for Netgear at the time) that I am not surprised by that. Had to recommend him to change the disks to SSDs at the time, which was crazy expensive, but it was either that or regularly dead HDDs due to being on a running truck 24/7.
And I just bought three 2TB solidigm p44's a couple weeks ago for my semi gaming rig unironically. Have them in a bootable raid 0 and have been fairly decent, not great being three NVME being accessed at the same time, absolutely pushing the rather limited chipset to it's limits. Will have to try the new driver and software and see how much it improves from ~10000-9000MB/s read/write. I hope to see future products, I would be interested to upgrade to solidigm dual 4TB NVME raid 0 setup ASAP to back off the chipset limitations, or even a single 8TB version.
Allyn is right that most people have no idea who solidigm is, I know them from the server drives and recommend them when it comes up for consumer m.2 but a lot of people give me a funny look and end up going WD/samsung.
I'm one of those you mentioned that got 4 Intel 670p NVMEs and put them in RAID0 ;) This was one month before the announcement that Intel would no longer be manufacturing or selling these drives. I was less than pleased. Anyways, for a "hobby" that ties in to my work it was a great way to tinker around with fast storage. Kudos to Solidigm for extending some form of support to the older drives, I'm looking forward to see what they come up with. As others have said, it would be great if they could pick up some of the Optane tech and use it properly.
Running a new workstation build for the last 2 weeks with a P41 for the OS and 2 P44 Pros for work. Super smooth and the Synergy app is pretty nice - pleasantly surprised. Really happy, and a totally outsized price-to-performance ratio. And an analysis appears to indicate that Solidigm has the best wear-leveling methodology in consumer drive space.
I wonder why you put the OS on the P41 rather than one of your P44s, which could have made the system a bit snappier? Just curious because I got a P44 and thinking of getting a P41, so trying to decide where to put what.
@@cgsather3309 Because I don't do most of my processing from the P41. The OS doesn't really benefit much from the already high speed of the P41 (4GB/s on P41 is already plenty fast), and any other app that doesn't get much acceleration from the speed difference between the 2 drives. The P44s get the intense workloads that use lots of disk space. I work in game dev, so opening multi-10+ GB projects is pretty common for me.
I have 4, Intel 665p 1tb with the x4 pcie card in my x299 rampage, and its stupid fast.7000mb r/w. The allocation time for steam is stupid fast. Install is stupid fast. I love them.
Have been looking for a new drive to upgrade my Samsung 960 Evo when feasible. Though just hearing about Solidigm from this video, the quick research definitely is keeping them as an upper contender.
OK you got me just ordered 2 of the Solidigm™ P41 Plus Series 2TB SSD from amazon UK there where 8 left now there are 6. If these work as i hope I will upgrade my system to Solidigm P44 Pro and shunt the P41's to mass storage
9:30 this should be implemented in the P44 Pro as well, everyone would agree to have their booting files in SLC just at the "begining" of the SSD Hopefully SOLIDIGM will keep their promise of providing support for their app and drivers for a long time. Even if the p44 is "powerful enough", the fast lane feature would be awsome too.
I've been a Samsung EVO SSD fanboy for 13 years or so. They are great value for the money, very decent performance and reliable my 970 EVO started acting weird after 6 years of usage. Decided to buy a Solidigm P44 PRO after doing my homework. Do not regret it one bit! It's insanely responsive. Even coming from a fast samsung SSD I can still notice it specially when moving a lot of files around
This is really great. Thank you Wendell for bringing us this content and thank you Allyn for all your hard work and for coming on to show it off. I've been very happy with my sk Hynix P41 Platinum in Linux. Can you talk more about the shared lineage of these two drive families and how they're (dis)similar? I've been looking into upgrading the two 970 EVO+ drives attached to my Windows VM and wanting to move away from Samsung. This gives me some great options with some exciting tech goodness. I've had problems with HMB drives and PCIe passthrough in the past, is this something y'all test at all before releasing new products and drivers? Thank you!
@@bambinone As I do not own a 980 pro I can not confirm this. But people are saying that if you force the nvme driver to install on the 980 pro it will give improvements. Samsung's driver is technically for pcie gen3. It could be the improvements with the driver is from people using the 980 pro on a pcie gen3 mobo.
True story: I had the idea to do several of these driver ideas myself. I would apply to work for them, but they have no jobs posted. That said, there's no reason a more general driver can't be written that can implement a lot of those same access pattern tricks for all SSDs, NVMe or otherwise.
What happened to Optane? The longevity of that drive was its main feature. Also, do we have to take 7% off the storage to (manually) reserve some space for future faulty cells?
Most drives come with ~7% spares already, but you can further overprovision to help get better performance/endurance. Similar impact by just letting the drive stay completely full all of the time (and make sure TRIM is working).
It should be noted that these drives do not seem to support hardware encryption. At least not TCG Opal. So that would be one regard where e.g. the Samsung or Crucial SSDs have a leg up on them, if that's something you need. Makes me sad, because I do encrypt my SSDs using OPAL all the time, so I wish the drives had that... apparently the datacenter variants might have it, but these are a bit expensive. Maybe in a later product...?
Do any of their models support the power protection Optane feature that Intel has also abandoned? Also: Will any of these unique optimization features interfere with using it as an L2ARC for ZFS on Linux?
Most SSDs offer some level of power loss protection. The Datacenter stuff offers a greater degree of protection for data that was in-flight when the power was lost. Modern Client SSDs coupled with journaling file systems (NTFS, EXT4, etc) are already fairly well protected even without specific PLP. Just understand that if you were copying or downloading a large file when the power was lost, that file probably did not finish writing. For L2ARC, either could work, but the P44 Pro is likely better suited for that type of task. Without the driver, the SSD still works fine, just less optimally if used under Windows, and no Fast Lane for the P41 Plus.
@@malventano but L2ARC is a read cache, if it gets corrupt on power loss no data loss. What about something like ZFS SLOG or LVM cache? Do these devices have capacitors to ensure enough power to complete writes if power is lost? I suppose maybe having _less_ DRAM is an advantage here? less data in-flight? might be a nice feature to support over competitors
I remain leery about custom storage drivers after Wendell talked up those Enmotus Fuze Drives that only ever got crappy windows drivers and then forgotten about.
I have recently brought two p44 pro 2tb, I think they are best price to performance at the moment!!! But where and when for 4tb? I would love to get one
You can go a long way with driver optimizations. The PC legacy structure is sized relative to ancient and puny systems, and that's beginning to cause a lot of bottlenecks in modern day hardware.
How would this do on Linux with Luks encryption? I remember some early ssh controllers (Sandforce?) doing some optimization work, deduplication, etc but that it falls down when the device is effectively filled with random data. But still, could probably optimize hot spots, etc
Man... I was saying that brand name so very wrong. Anyhow, I had no idea it was all the old Intel guys. Next time I have to buy a drive, I'll definitely consider Solidigm.
It’s still insane that the p44 pro with the driver beats the 990 pro (which is MLC) despite it being TLC. I have been praising the P44 Pro like crazy. Also has the best latency out of any NVME drive.
I just bought a 1tb Samsung but now thinking I should have for this in a 2tb for just a bit more money. Dram was important to me though as I was going to put it in a usb case but have the option of it becoming main drive ..
valve should listen do this. a underestimated use case would be steam users with a huge backlog of a game collection that would benefit from tiered storage. especially if they use a steam deck, nas and a couple of different drives, constantly struggling to keep their steam library in shape, juggling to run the most used games on a fast ssd and manually micromanaging their game cache.
I have everything stored on 2 1TB WD Black PCIe 4.0 NVME's, when I installed them I setup my backups to go to SSD's, all accept my backup of my backups which are on 4TB SATA hard drives, but since I use Linux, running backups in the background doesn't slow anything down for me, now that I'm on an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X system I built myself last year. On that note: Don't brag about how much faster your PC is, because I remember computing and the internet in 1979, and you are very likely clueless on how slow computing can be! Patience is a virtue, and impatience is disasters waiting to happen!
Generally, Linux folks looking for cache or L2ARC type of drives should probably go for the P44 Pro over the P41 Plus. For regular use, either would be fine.
I always used to scoff at the thought of installing a driver for a standardised storage device like this, rarely seeing any significant performance improvements and figuring that the "driver" was actually more spyware crap to reap metrics if nothing more sinister. However, this has convinced me to be less cynical in future. And put Solidigm on my map! Annoyingly, I literally just bought a 2TB WD Black SN850X … these prices are significantly less than I paid!
Perhaps it's just me, but since I updated my Intel 660p 1TB with Solidigm's new firmware (and maybe driver?).....it seems to work a bit better and doesn't 'bottom out' as quickly during extensive sequential writes, where it used to bog down to 100MB/s after the first couple GB's of a large file was written. Now it seems to fly. I use this drive to remux BR's and transcode and overall just beat up on it.....and it's still ticking after a few solid years of abuse.
This is interesting, Im always going for the different products that are "To spec" I actually wanted to go with intel storage anyway as they were good for the price, When i found out they are rebranding and that i could actually pick them up in the UK and this was back in october, (Its hard to get hynix stuff here) I got a P41 in my nuc 4x4, Got x2 2TB P44 Pros in my nuc 12 extreme, and honestly they are a champ, I didnt need the P44s really, but i like to have the higher tier in my main system, The P41s are absolutely stellar for what they are, I would argue for the typical gamer they are better than many things on the market, I would like to see a 2230 drive i can get hold of, might as well add one to the steamdeck.
...must be a sign from the interstellar overlords... I just wrote on a forum that my next upgrade had to be storage as it is getting rather old and dusty and what do you know.... A Wendell/Allyn colab about storage.. Guess it's time for a pair of p44 pro's next month. Cheers fellas
It is great to have competition, the P41 drive looks fine and improving constantly but at that price point currently the WD SN770 is a better drive with no special driver.
Really hope Solidigm could create some raid type software to compete with Drivepool or Storage Spaces that uses their driver in it. Right now you lose all the driver and software "magic" if you get more than 1 drive and want to poll/raid them all together. Or maybe work with Microsoft to somehow enable the Solidigm driver within Storage Spaces.
Great show, I am trying to upgrade a ESXI 8 server that had 8 1TB drives raid 0 (I know no backup and stupid but, I like to live dangerously). As an upgrade I just bought an Asus 4 nvme card and am planning on buying 4 2TB nvme. Will this work with ESXI and what should I buy as far as Solidigm for my ESXI 8 server?
@Allyn Malventano - Could you please clarify if updating the P44 Pro firmware with this new Solidigm software is safe on an existing drive with my OS installed. And once installed, does the software keep running as a service in the background after subsequent boots or just if/when manually launched. I doubt the software would be required to run every time Windows boots to take advantage of the optimizations (which should be driver based) - but just checking if this software has to load at boot and sit in the background for the optimizations like 'Fast Lane' to work. Thank you kindly.
@@Level1Techs Thank you. Is Fast Lane totally safe and can be enabled or disabled at will? I ask because someone stated that its like Primocache, but why would my P44Pro need such virtual cache?!
@@Level1Techs Just wanted to report that I installed the Driver and Toolkit on my P44 Pro, and RND4K results (Q32Ti and Q1T1) showed a noticeable uptick in CrystalDiskmark test. However, the Toolkit does not support Fast Lane for P44 Pro and even my Firmware 001C is showing up to date (meaning the 002C firmware shown in the video is only for P41 Plus).
Glad to see Allyn M. again. I miss his superb in-depth reviews.
…and I miss doing them!
Yep Allyn is cool.
Honestly, I could listen to Wendel and Allyn talk about toasters for days. HighFive L1T
Excellent content! Solidigm is now on my radar. Thanks Wendell and Allyn!
Thanks for this. Found that my Intel 670p also supports these drivers- got a decent speed boost too.
Hey! Allyn! I wondered what happened to him! Nice to see him still hanging around. I always tend to learn something when he shows up.
Ah, the good old pcper days, with Josh I learn silicone and financials and storage with allyn
My 660p and 670p drives have served me well. Bought another p41 plus after watching this. Definitely will recommend to friends and coworkers. But you need 4TB drives!
This reminds me of how Broadcom got started with their NICs in the early 2000's.... also herding the cats is a fantastic analogy that I myself have used for years...
I recently built a 7800X3D system with Solidigm P44Pro 2TB drive as the main OS drive. I was going to pickup WD850X, but then came across Solidigm P44Pro, and it was right up there with the best of the best, and it turned out to be a Hynix own (old Intel) brand. I will be trying out this new driver/software for my P44 Pro later tonight. I hope this is safe to use on existing drives and does not cause any drive wipes/resets and data loss.
Installing the driver should have no impact on the existing contents of the drive. That said, everyone should have an up-to-date backup before doing more drastic things like firmware updates, etc.
hahaha why 7800X3D is dead rip
@@lightward9487if the main function of you PC is gaming, there is no better CPU for this than the 7800x3d.
This is cool. Love to see Allyn and excited to see more from Solidigm
You had me excited when you said it's the former Optane division and then my interest sort of dropped off a cliff when you immediately said it's NAND flash.
I would like to see Optane take off for consumers...
Pretty sure only Intel and Micron has access to Optane/3D-XPoint IP. Don’t think former engineers could just walk off with that stuff and do it elsewhere. 😅
@@kurousagi1339 Very true but I guess I was hoping maybe they had a different storage breakthrough that operated on similar principles but had better material properties. This is very much just an SLC cache in place of a DRAM cache with some sophisticated mechanisms in the driver. Which yes, that's cool and all, maybe a _little_ more novel, but isn't automatic over every OS stack and still fundamentally operates over the limits of the flash. There's only so much that caching can do for you.
And on the side of writes, Optane is pretty unparalleled. Having something flush to stable storage reliably and fast (faster than what SLC flash can do) is what makes Optane a perfect fit for a write cache, dedicated intent log, journal, or anything other trick enabled by the file system to reduce the latency of a write. The fast SLC cache here just basically makes it at best what those STEC writezilla devices could and at worst, a crappier form of that because it may require software in between to quickly sync those writes.
Don't get me wrong, that's not Optane's only benefit and I'm not completely opposed to having a software assisted mechanism that works in tandem with the firmware, it's just there are a lot of places that can go wrong. Even getting all of those details right over Illumos, FreeBSD, Linux, OS X and Windows (and that might be a big ask, given how well even host assisted SMR went), this isn't super exciting for me.
@@kurousagi1339 one could hope that Intel or micron would sublicense the tech given the discontinued nature of the products.
@@kurousagi1339 IIRC Intel bought Micron out. And then Intel closed up shop, but I think Intel was trying to sell some/all of the IP.
I love watching people who genuinely love what they do!
Great to see Allyn again, been a long time. I had seen these drives on Newegg recently and had no idea what the brand was.
Super excited for this. Been using the 660p and 670p SSDs for years now with no issues.
I was shopping for an SSD today and I remembered seeing this interview on the playlist and figured I'd check it out. Fire Breathing indeed!
Got a P44 drive on sale the other day, been very happy with it. Solidigm is fantastic.
Really wish there was a 4TB option for the p41 plus
Ya that’s too bad. I was about to buy one
yeah they really need a 4tb
Seems awesome. Very nice and reasonable ideas.
I just missed you talking about Linux support. Can we have hope?
My question as well. *"But does it Linux"*
Ditto...where is the linux (and freebsd if you can (solidigm)))! Good stuff.
Picked up a P44 Pro 2tb a few weeks back. good stuff, even better now wow
These also seem to have a great price in Europe as well. When will 4TB SDDs be released?
Hello Allyn good to see you man, i miss your reviews. I hope you're doing great!
I have been unbelievably impressed with the low power draw on the p41plus. It makes me regret my skhynix gold 2tb purchase a year ago for laptop use.
We do lots of work to optimize power draw, but don't feel bad about that SK purchase - those guys also take power usage seriously.
Great to see Allyn back on, Wish he would do some more review stuff especially in the storage world.
I'd love to as well, but I'm busy doing all of that fun test stuff for just one company these days!
I have a surprisingly long-lived WD black in a tiered storage setup for games (I tend to play one or two games to completion before picking up another one so I don't see many slowdowns) but once I'm due for an upgrade I might finally go all SSD.
I almost purchased from Newegg but came back to use links in the description. I love this channel!
Wow Solidigm seems to be offering alot of value with their products. Maybe its time I left spinning rust behind completely.
Just got one question - is the software for the SSD available outside of Windows? I only ask this because if Solidigm wanted to sell a bunch of these devices, they should have something available through Flatpak for the Steam Deck users with a 2230 formfactor so that they have a "Solid" option that's not by Kioxia.
Thank you for this video. One can't go wrong following Allyn's recommendations. I am now a Solidigm convert!
Awww ❤ ... Wendell's play date is back... and he brought new toys 🏎️
Hey Wendel, and Allen for that matter, do you think Solidigm will pick up Optane seeing as Intel has abandoned it? Or does Intel have a rigor mortis death grip on that intellectual property.
It's not about the IP, it's about the viability of the technology. After manufacturing, they realized that the price is higher than SSD, faster but not as high capacity, but slower than RAM but with higher capacity but not as well integrated as RAM in many systems, requiring some sort of CPU support and platform support. So it's in a no man's land.
Now I'm really curious if that dynamic queue assignment ends up being a boon in all these games that have a bunch of traversal stutter, especially the UE4 ones that are basically pegging one main game thread and one render thread. I poked around a bit with the Dead Space remake and found that the length of the longest frame time spike correlated with how fast a drive it was loading from. Don't go as far as a USB HDD though, because you'll just end up with holes in the world when the reads time out and never get retried. :)
I've used nothing but Intel/Solidigm professional/enterprise-class SSD's since my first SSD about a decade ago. Even the oldest ones are still functioning today, rated at 100% health, with 97-98%% TBW endurance left on them still. I purchased my first M.2 drive this year for a new 2024 build & went with the Solidigm/Intel P44 Pro 2TB M.2 2280 NVMe.
Damnit I think I'm going to have to buy another P44 for the desktop. Always love seeing Allyn too, makes for some of my favorite video's!
Good video, very informative. One question: When you use a filesystem like ZFS having its own prefetch policies, how it compares against doing it at driver level (which doesn't now about discontinous file extents, it just knows about consecutive blocks...)? Is it counter productive if both are tryng to achieve their own prefetch or are they somehow complementary ?
It shouldn’t interfere since ZFS would typically be on a Linux system and our driver is Windows only. The prefetching concepts are similar for both cases though.
@@malventano Allyn how's the Linux driver going? is the configuration exposed with a GUI as on the Windows counterpart.. don't forget to feed the Linux village, they're a significant and loyal bunch ;)
@@tyyuuuihycyctct most of our optimizations are not as necessary on Linux, and the hardware still works well without it even on Windows.
Ooooo, time to keep Solidigm on my watchlist. This is awesome! And ya on the game dev side of things, for larger games with engines that deal with groups of entities for effiency, lets say on the CPU cache, it makes sense to see those large sequentials. I could only imagine how much more performance could happen. Then again, it's another thing that devs have to make sure to design it that way, just like making a game multithreaded.
I have two of the 2TB P44 Pros in my latest build. Wish they made a 4TB model or the P44 Pro or the P41 to use as a game drive.
That might be the best looking hardware dashboard, and it's for an SSD too which usually aren't too pretty.
Just ordered a p41 drive for a boot drive upgrade to a fresh Windows 11 install. Let's see what this can do!
Well, since I had a trucker as a customer for High End Netgear NAS server asking for support (was working for Netgear at the time) that I am not surprised by that. Had to recommend him to change the disks to SSDs at the time, which was crazy expensive, but it was either that or regularly dead HDDs due to being on a running truck 24/7.
And I just bought three 2TB solidigm p44's a couple weeks ago for my semi gaming rig unironically. Have them in a bootable raid 0 and have been fairly decent, not great being three NVME being accessed at the same time, absolutely pushing the rather limited chipset to it's limits.
Will have to try the new driver and software and see how much it improves from ~10000-9000MB/s read/write.
I hope to see future products, I would be interested to upgrade to solidigm dual 4TB NVME raid 0 setup ASAP to back off the chipset limitations, or even a single 8TB version.
Wish there were versions with higher capacity, but I bought 2 P44 Pro's to try :)
wow had no idea what solidigm was doing with those drivers, I'll have to use them for my next drive to check it out
Allyn is right that most people have no idea who solidigm is, I know them from the server drives and recommend them when it comes up for consumer m.2 but a lot of people give me a funny look and end up going WD/samsung.
I'm one of those you mentioned that got 4 Intel 670p NVMEs and put them in RAID0 ;) This was one month before the announcement that Intel would no longer be manufacturing or selling these drives. I was less than pleased. Anyways, for a "hobby" that ties in to my work it was a great way to tinker around with fast storage. Kudos to Solidigm for extending some form of support to the older drives, I'm looking forward to see what they come up with. As others have said, it would be great if they could pick up some of the Optane tech and use it properly.
Running a new workstation build for the last 2 weeks with a P41 for the OS and 2 P44 Pros for work. Super smooth and the Synergy app is pretty nice - pleasantly surprised. Really happy, and a totally outsized price-to-performance ratio. And an analysis appears to indicate that Solidigm has the best wear-leveling methodology in consumer drive space.
I wonder why you put the OS on the P41 rather than one of your P44s, which could have made the system a bit snappier? Just curious because I got a P44 and thinking of getting a P41, so trying to decide where to put what.
@@cgsather3309 Because I don't do most of my processing from the P41. The OS doesn't really benefit much from the already high speed of the P41 (4GB/s on P41 is already plenty fast), and any other app that doesn't get much acceleration from the speed difference between the 2 drives. The P44s get the intense workloads that use lots of disk space. I work in game dev, so opening multi-10+ GB projects is pretty common for me.
Yup, added three P41 Plus 2TB's to my TrueNAS server for a fast pool, and it's blazing fast.
I have 4, Intel 665p 1tb with the x4 pcie card in my x299 rampage, and its stupid fast.7000mb r/w. The allocation time for steam is stupid fast. Install is stupid fast. I love them.
perfect timing. i think ill put the p44 in my new build!
Have been looking for a new drive to upgrade my Samsung 960 Evo when feasible. Though just hearing about Solidigm from this video, the quick research definitely is keeping them as an upper contender.
It's good to know who Solidigm are. Now I can buy with confidence. It's currently the cheapest 1TB NVMe gen4 at £37.
OK you got me just ordered 2 of the Solidigm™ P41 Plus Series 2TB SSD from amazon UK there where 8 left now there are 6. If these work as i hope I will upgrade my system to Solidigm P44 Pro and shunt the P41's to mass storage
9:30 this should be implemented in the P44 Pro as well, everyone would agree to have their booting files in SLC just at the "begining" of the SSD
Hopefully SOLIDIGM will keep their promise of providing support for their app and drivers for a long time.
Even if the p44 is "powerful enough", the fast lane feature would be awsome too.
Great video!
I love this channel!
Solidigm rocks!
Bought one of these already. its a P41 plus 1TB.. didnt know about performance gains lol
I've been a Samsung EVO SSD fanboy for 13 years or so. They are great value for the money, very decent performance and reliable
my 970 EVO started acting weird after 6 years of usage. Decided to buy a Solidigm P44 PRO after doing my homework.
Do not regret it one bit! It's insanely responsive. Even coming from a fast samsung SSD I can still notice it specially when moving a lot of files around
No shit a pci-e 4.0 is faster than a 3.0...99.99% of people can't tell the difference between a pci-e 5.0 ssd and a sata ssd to be honest.
Dang. So many questions... Firstly does the driver come in a linux flavor 🤩. How would these drives fare in as a cache or log device?
Not on Linux unfortunately. For cache/log the P44 Pro would be the better choice.
On Linux the kernel itself is better at caching, they have targeted the OS that needs the most help, aka Windows
This is really great. Thank you Wendell for bringing us this content and thank you Allyn for all your hard work and for coming on to show it off.
I've been very happy with my sk Hynix P41 Platinum in Linux. Can you talk more about the shared lineage of these two drive families and how they're (dis)similar?
I've been looking into upgrading the two 970 EVO+ drives attached to my Windows VM and wanting to move away from Samsung. This gives me some great options with some exciting tech goodness. I've had problems with HMB drives and PCIe passthrough in the past, is this something y'all test at all before releasing new products and drivers?
Thank you!
Gotta get both next time i need a good combo of nvme drives
Good video. Thanks for the shout-out!
5:03 Samsung has there own nvme driver. They are the only ones that I know of before Solidigm that have a driver for nvme.
Not for all models... e.g. it loads for a 970 EVO+ but not for a 980 Pro.
@@bambinone As I do not own a 980 pro I can not confirm this. But people are saying that if you force the nvme driver to install on the 980 pro it will give improvements. Samsung's driver is technically for pcie gen3. It could be the improvements with the driver is from people using the 980 pro on a pcie gen3 mobo.
Been looking at the p41 plus for a while but now that I know it has the L1 seal of approval it's a no brainer
the p44 pro is the fastest ssd I ever used. these guys know what they're doing.
Can we mention anything about Optane? Glad that Solidigm came to be and I hope Wendell can keep up us updated.
You got me by the wallet with these sort of performance metrics. I'm in the market for another SSD.
Very revealing! Thank you, guys...🇺🇸 😎👍☕
Now I am waiting for the same video on Linux channel. I will wait...
True story: I had the idea to do several of these driver ideas myself. I would apply to work for them, but they have no jobs posted. That said, there's no reason a more general driver can't be written that can implement a lot of those same access pattern tricks for all SSDs, NVMe or otherwise.
What happened to Optane? The longevity of that drive was its main feature. Also, do we have to take 7% off the storage to (manually) reserve some space for future faulty cells?
Most drives come with ~7% spares already, but you can further overprovision to help get better performance/endurance. Similar impact by just letting the drive stay completely full all of the time (and make sure TRIM is working).
Trucker checking in. Yes, I admin my self-hosted cloud/media servers from a different city every day.
It should be noted that these drives do not seem to support hardware encryption. At least not TCG Opal.
So that would be one regard where e.g. the Samsung or Crucial SSDs have a leg up on them, if that's something you need.
Makes me sad, because I do encrypt my SSDs using OPAL all the time, so I wish the drives had that... apparently the datacenter variants might have it, but these are a bit expensive. Maybe in a later product...?
I hope we see more development of this zoned storage-like tech as their HMC in the consumer space.
Do any of their models support the power protection Optane feature that Intel has also abandoned?
Also: Will any of these unique optimization features interfere with using it as an L2ARC for ZFS on Linux?
yes I am also wondering anout Power Loss Protection
Most SSDs offer some level of power loss protection. The Datacenter stuff offers a greater degree of protection for data that was in-flight when the power was lost. Modern Client SSDs coupled with journaling file systems (NTFS, EXT4, etc) are already fairly well protected even without specific PLP. Just understand that if you were copying or downloading a large file when the power was lost, that file probably did not finish writing.
For L2ARC, either could work, but the P44 Pro is likely better suited for that type of task. Without the driver, the SSD still works fine, just less optimally if used under Windows, and no Fast Lane for the P41 Plus.
@@malventano but L2ARC is a read cache, if it gets corrupt on power loss no data loss. What about something like ZFS SLOG or LVM cache? Do these devices have capacitors to ensure enough power to complete writes if power is lost? I suppose maybe having _less_ DRAM is an advantage here? less data in-flight? might be a nice feature to support over competitors
I remain leery about custom storage drivers after Wendell talked up those Enmotus Fuze Drives that only ever got crappy windows drivers and then forgotten about.
I have recently brought two p44 pro 2tb, I think they are best price to performance at the moment!!!
But where and when for 4tb? I would love to get one
Love it dudes!! So glad someone is innovative
Any chance of getting a Linux driver any time soon? Or software for Debian? Would love to get these improvements on my TrueNAS box.
You can go a long way with driver optimizations. The PC legacy structure is sized relative to ancient and puny systems, and that's beginning to cause a lot of bottlenecks in modern day hardware.
I've had a P41 Plus 2TB for 6 months. But I'll be updating the driver now...
How would this do on Linux with Luks encryption? I remember some early ssh controllers (Sandforce?) doing some optimization work, deduplication, etc but that it falls down when the device is effectively filled with random data. But still, could probably optimize hot spots, etc
I will give the P44 Pro consideration next build… impressive!
Man... I was saying that brand name so very wrong. Anyhow, I had no idea it was all the old Intel guys. Next time I have to buy a drive, I'll definitely consider Solidigm.
I wonder if any of this software will come to sk hynix drives since solidigm is a subsidiary
It’s still insane that the p44 pro with the driver beats the 990 pro (which is MLC) despite it being TLC. I have been praising the P44 Pro like crazy. Also has the best latency out of any NVME drive.
I just bought a 1tb Samsung but now thinking I should have for this in a 2tb for just a bit more money.
Dram was important to me though as I was going to put it in a usb case but have the option of it becoming main drive ..
valve should listen do this. a underestimated use case would be steam users with a huge backlog of a game collection that would benefit from tiered storage. especially if they use a steam deck, nas and a couple of different drives, constantly struggling to keep their steam library in shape, juggling to run the most used games on a fast ssd and manually micromanaging their game cache.
I have everything stored on 2 1TB WD Black PCIe 4.0 NVME's, when I installed them I setup my backups to go to SSD's, all accept my backup of my backups which are on 4TB SATA hard drives, but since I use Linux, running backups in the background doesn't slow anything down for me, now that I'm on an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X system I built myself last year. On that note: Don't brag about how much faster your PC is, because I remember computing and the internet in 1979, and you are very likely clueless on how slow computing can be! Patience is a virtue, and impatience is disasters waiting to happen!
well, what about LINUX drivers??
Or did I miss something?
What was the reason for saying that Linux users should consider the P41 drive?
Generally, Linux folks looking for cache or L2ARC type of drives should probably go for the P44 Pro over the P41 Plus. For regular use, either would be fine.
This is good info. I've been seeing the Solidigm brand but, before this, I thought it was just another random Chinese brand.
I always used to scoff at the thought of installing a driver for a standardised storage device like this, rarely seeing any significant performance improvements and figuring that the "driver" was actually more spyware crap to reap metrics if nothing more sinister. However, this has convinced me to be less cynical in future. And put Solidigm on my map! Annoyingly, I literally just bought a 2TB WD Black SN850X … these prices are significantly less than I paid!
I've been eyeing the P44 Pro but I'm primarily a Linux user. Please tell Solidigm to get their tweaks into the Linux kernel!
sk Hynix P41 Platinum is great on Linux.
I miss fancycache/primocache
Why do i have 64gigs of ram and not utilize it?
Perhaps it's just me, but since I updated my Intel 660p 1TB with Solidigm's new firmware (and maybe driver?).....it seems to work a bit better and doesn't 'bottom out' as quickly during extensive sequential writes, where it used to bog down to 100MB/s after the first couple GB's of a large file was written. Now it seems to fly. I use this drive to remux BR's and transcode and overall just beat up on it.....and it's still ticking after a few solid years of abuse.
Would be interested to see how much this improves a 670p.
Such a shame 670p is a QLC drive
@@Vysair For $72 at newegg for 2TB its perfectly fine for what it is.
This is interesting, Im always going for the different products that are "To spec" I actually wanted to go with intel storage anyway as they were good for the price, When i found out they are rebranding and that i could actually pick them up in the UK and this was back in october, (Its hard to get hynix stuff here) I got a P41 in my nuc 4x4, Got x2 2TB P44 Pros in my nuc 12 extreme, and honestly they are a champ, I didnt need the P44s really, but i like to have the higher tier in my main system, The P41s are absolutely stellar for what they are, I would argue for the typical gamer they are better than many things on the market, I would like to see a 2230 drive i can get hold of, might as well add one to the steamdeck.
...must be a sign from the interstellar overlords... I just wrote on a forum that my next upgrade had to be storage as it is getting rather old and dusty and what do you know.... A Wendell/Allyn colab about storage.. Guess it's time for a pair of p44 pro's next month. Cheers fellas
I caved.. I couldn't wait till next month.. got myself a p44 pro and a p41 plus.. Very impressed with the performance so fare.
It is great to have competition, the P41 drive looks fine and improving constantly but at that price point currently the WD SN770 is a better drive with no special driver.
Any way this works for the SK Hynix p41 platinum?
Really hope Solidigm could create some raid type software to compete with Drivepool or Storage Spaces that uses their driver in it. Right now you lose all the driver and software "magic" if you get more than 1 drive and want to poll/raid them all together. Or maybe work with Microsoft to somehow enable the Solidigm driver within Storage Spaces.
Great show, I am trying to upgrade a ESXI 8 server that had 8 1TB drives raid 0 (I know no backup and stupid but, I like to live dangerously). As an upgrade I just bought an Asus 4 nvme card and am planning on buying 4 2TB nvme. Will this work with ESXI and what should I buy as far as Solidigm for my ESXI 8 server?
@Allyn Malventano - Could you please clarify if updating the P44 Pro firmware with this new Solidigm software is safe on an existing drive with my OS installed. And once installed, does the software keep running as a service in the background after subsequent boots or just if/when manually launched. I doubt the software would be required to run every time Windows boots to take advantage of the optimizations (which should be driver based) - but just checking if this software has to load at boot and sit in the background for the optimizations like 'Fast Lane' to work. Thank you kindly.
It's in the driver. I updated firmware on my drives without loss of data.
@@Level1Techs Thank you. Is Fast Lane totally safe and can be enabled or disabled at will? I ask because someone stated that its like Primocache, but why would my P44Pro need such virtual cache?!
It's safe. No need to disable it. It's not like primocache in the bad aspects of primocache and data in flight
@@Level1Techs Thank you. Much appreciated.
@@Level1Techs Just wanted to report that I installed the Driver and Toolkit on my P44 Pro, and RND4K results (Q32Ti and Q1T1) showed a noticeable uptick in CrystalDiskmark test. However, the Toolkit does not support Fast Lane for P44 Pro and even my Firmware 001C is showing up to date (meaning the 002C firmware shown in the video is only for P41 Plus).