Podcast #92: Intel’s Allyn Malventano Joins Brian For A Lively Discussion On PCIe Gen 5.0

Brian invites Allyn Malventano to join him in the lab for an often candid discussion of SSD technology, specifically PCIe Gen 5.0. Allyn is, as he puts it, a jack-of-all-trades-storage, Storage Technical Analyst. Although Allyn works for Intel, he is tasked with understanding all vendor equipment related to storage and servers.

Allyn brought along a system for a live demo analog with Samsung’s Gen5 PM1743 SSDs. The discussion is mostly around SSDs, performance, and configuration requirements. It is a lively discussion about how to get the most from your existing system and what to look for moving forward.

Allyn and Brian discuss PCIe Gen 5 during Podcast in the StorageReview.com lab

Intro
Gen 5 discussion
Migration from PCIe 4 to PCIe 5
Discussion around rapid development and PCIe 6 coming soon
Overall performance
Allyn and Brian show off products on display

Minute 5:00

Phison discussion. Link to review
Power and heat dissipation
Reasons demanding heat sink
Testing and stress tests
Why move to Gen 5?

Minute 9:30

Gaming
How lanes will be used for newer SSDs with Gen 5
How do systems manufacturers deal with carving up the lane usage
Supermicro design overview
How to expand an existing configuration using mux or other third-party devices
CPU clock speeds. What’s being shown at CES.

Minute 16:00

Where to install into Gen 5 SSDs in an existing system
GPU workload performance
Power budget and how to control where the power is distributed
Dynamically adjusting lane usage
What is coming in SSDs for systems

Minute 25:00

Enterprise servers
How to engineer for performance
Reducing lane usage and potentially reducing equipment
Managing workloads across SSDs, power, lanes, CPU
Using a NUC to split workload usage
Drobo storage device

Minute 35:00

Allyn reminisces about his time in the Navy and how it affected system design
Discussion around parity and redundancy
SSD Adapter cards and how they work
How the system on display is configured
Drives used in the system

Minute 40:00

Live demo
Using Samsung PM-1743 Drives
Iometer display to illustrate the performance

Minute 45:00

Wrap up
Allyn’s take-aways on Gen 5 SSDs
Price impact because it is a niche market

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2 years ago

Harold Fritts

I have been in the tech industry since IBM created Selectric. My background, though, is writing. So I decided to get out of the pre-sales biz and return to my roots, doing a bit of writing but still being involved in technology.