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  • 29a - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link

    NVMe Host Memory Buffer

    I wonder why OSs don't include something like this by default for all storage devices.
  • Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link

    Graphics cards have had this kind of capability for a long time, but storage devices traditionally didn't need much working memory aside from buffers for user data, and putting those buffers in host memory doesn't accomplish anything. Flash-based SSDs are the first storage devices to need a non-trivial amount of scratch memory for their own internal metadata, so it's no surprise that the HMB feature originates with a storage protocol designed around SSDs rather than hard drives.
  • ksec - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link

    When can we expect this? 7 GB/s Seq Read Write!
  • Santoval - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link

    Rainier and Tacoma are targeted at the HEDT and enterprise market, so (along with their 16+TB capacity) SSDs sporting them will cost an arm, a leg, a kidney and half a liver. These SSDs will not be in an M.2 format either, so even if you robbed a bank or inherited a small fortune from a rich uncle you had no idea existed (a wet dream, surely) you couldn't pair them with with your brand new Ryzen 30xx CPU.

    You would need to plug them in a server, unless perhaps there was an adapter you could use. SSDs with Rainier might also be available in an M.2 version, but not SSDs with Tacoma. Tacoma is in a class of its own :)
  • ballsystemlord - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link

    I think he meant, "When can we expect consumer drives to be able to handle 7GB/s Seq Read/Write?"
    Ignoring the fact that even someone as crazy as me would not need that rate of sequential transfers (even an ISO image of Linux is 4GB!), and would rather have higher random I/O speed improvements, the answer is "probably in 4 years". That's assuming we get those speeds at all, because, like I said, we have no use for them.

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