Linux 6.13 Rolling Out NVMe 2.1 Support & NVMe Rotational Media

[discordian]

still waiting to connect my cd-burner over NVME. why arent there any forward looking standards?

[elvis]

also wake me up when an HDD comes close to even touching sata limits, this is just nonsense

The post directly after yours linked to an excellent YouTube video demonstrating that this has lots of benefits for multi-disk applications.

When you're rolling out massive drive arrays for S3 storage, ZFS nearline arrays, Ceph clusters, etc, then NVME has a lot of benefits over legacy SATA/SAS in both simplifying the connection points, as well as removing some upper limits to how many devices can be attached without needing more controllers.

Similarly, hanging lots of rotational disks off a single 6Gbit controller with port multipliers is absolutely a bottleneck. Again, see the video for how simplified PCIE switching and NVME results in simpler hardware and higher speeds.

The video also talks about what it looks like when every bit of compute and IO is all on the same fabric. For future workloads, having multiple classes of storage, network, GPUs and the like all on the same PCIE/NVME fabric simplifies a lot of problems we have in high end clustering.

Lots of applications for this beyond what a single drive looks like in 2024. NVME looked pretty silly even for flash when it first arrived, because we couldn't hit those speeds back then. But it was clear that it was a necessary change as things moved forward. Limiting things to today's technology is not how the industry works.

NVMe requires a new physical connector and form factor over SATA/SAS

When has that ever stopped the progression of disk technology (or any technology)? We've had things like SCSI, IDE, SATA, and SAS over the years. Physical connector changes are a natural part of technological evolution.

[ahrs]

Sounds great. Nevertheless it is so sad that most consumer SSDs only support exactly one namespace at once. That is as useful as a partition table scheme capable to hold one partition max - aka pointless!

You want more? Most of my installs consist of exactly one partition on legacy BIOS/MBR (ignoring the small unformatted partition at the beginning that's unused for the bootloader) and two on UEFI/GPT systems.

Is there something I'm missing? Are namespaces for VMs or containers? You might as well run some complicated LVM setup instead and do it in software.

[ayumu]

Moore's law. SATA3 is limited to 600 MB/s per drive. NVMe already supports PCIe 5.0 16x drives already transfer up to 63 GB/s and more is expected with PCIe 6.0. You just need to spin the motor a bit faster.

who's making HDDs that are this fast?

[hajj_3]

who's making HDDs that are this fast?

there's an 18tb one that does 530mb/s, sata can only manage 550mb/s so we are near to being bottlenecked.

[mobadboy]

support for offloading some host processing to NVMe storage devices

waiting for the inevitable blocklist for misbehaving nvme drives that swallow data in some absurd way

cant be bothered to check, but id be surprised if the infrastructure (or even the blocklist itself) arent already created.

[zboszor]

Moore's law. SATA3 is limited to 600 MB/s per drive. NVMe already supports PCIe 5.0 16x drives already transfer up to 63 GB/s and more is expected with PCIe 6.0. You just need to spin the motor a bit faster.

That would risk exploding disks, like with those 52x or even higher speed CD players.

I suspect it's about cutting a smaller disk to fit on the M.2 form factor. With the evolving magnetic density, you can still have a very high transfer rate and over 1TB capacities. A smaller radius disk reduces seek times, which was already exercised long time ago. Look up "short stroking hard disk".

[Teggs]

Moore's law. SATA3 is limited to 600 MB/s per drive. NVMe already supports PCIe 5.0 16x drives already transfer up to 63 GB/s and more is expected with PCIe 6.0. You just need to spin the motor a bit faster.

Watch someone invent a mini-disc-sized platter that stores 100TB and spins like a bat out of hell.

[billyswong]

man people here with the memes and missing the point so hard
NVMe requires a new physical connector and form factor over SATA/SAS, also wake me up when an HDD comes close to even touching sata limits, this is just nonsense

There is a U.2 port+connector for NVMe devices not plugged into motherboards directly. The only issue is lack of drives using that port in the consumer market.

[cl333r]

Why not? NVME support vastly more command queues and is both faster and more efficient over fiber channel. Just to name a couple of reasons.

Yep, in fact I have a few PCs with floppy disks over NVMe and they now achieve similar speed to regular SATA HDDs, also, I have yet to test my vynil records over NVMe.