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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