Day: November 12, 2020

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Highpoint Updates NVMe RAID Cards For PCIe 4.0, Up To 8 M.2 SSDs

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16247/highpoint-updates-nvme-raid-cards-for-pcie-40-up-to-8-m2-ssds

HighPoint Technologies has updated their NVMe RAID solutions with PCIe 4.0 support and adapter cards supporting up to eight NVMe drives. The new HighPoint SSD7500 series adapter cards are the PCIe 4.0 successors to the SSD7100 and SSD7200 series products. These cards are primarily aimed at the workstation market, as the server market has largely moved on from traditional RAID arrays, especially when using NVMe SSDs for which traditional hardware RAID controllers do not exist. HighPoint’s PCIe gen4 lineup currently consists of cards with four or eight M.2 slots, and one with eight SFF-8654 ports for connecting to U.2 SSDs. They also recently added an 8x M.2 card to their PCIe gen3 family, with the Mac Pro specifically in mind as a popular workstation platform that won’t be getting PCIe gen4 support particularly soon.

HighPoint’s NVMe RAID is implemented as software RAID bundled with adapter cards featuring Broadcom/PLX PCIe switches. HighPoint provides RAID drivers and management utilities for Windows, macOS and Linux. Competing software NVMe RAID solutions like Intel RST or VROC achieve boot support by bundling a UEFI driver in with the rest of the motherboard’s firmware. Highpoint’s recent 4-drive cards include their UEFI driver on an Option ROM to provide boot support for Windows and Linux systems, and all of their cards allow booting from an SSD that is not part of a RAID array. HighPoint’s NVMe RAID supports RAID 0/1/10 modes, but does not implement any parity RAID options.

Highpoint has also improved the cooling on their RAID cards. Putting several high-performance M.2 SSDs and a power-hungry PCIe switch on one card generally requires active cooling, and HighPoint’s early NVMe RAID cards could be pretty noisy. Their newer heatsink design lets the cards benefit from airflow provided by case fans instead of just the card’s own fan (two fans, for the 8x M.2 cards), and the fans they are now using are a bit larger and quieter.

In the PCIe 2.0 era, PLX PCIe switches were common on high-end consumer motherboards to provide multi-GPU connectivity. In the PCIe 3.0 era, the switches were priced for the server market and almost completely disappeared from consumer/enthusiast products. In the PCIe 4.0 era, it looks like prices have gone up again. Even though these cards are the best way to get lots of M.2 PCIe SSDs connected to mainstream consumer platforms that don’t support the PCIe port bifurcation required by passive quad M.2 riser boards, the pricing makes it very unlikely that they’ll ever see much use in systems less high-end than a Threadripper or Xeon workstation. However, Highpoint has actually tested on the AMD X570 platform and achieved 20GB/s throughput using Phison E16 SSDs, and almost 28GB/s on an AMD EPYC platform (out of a theoretical limit of 31.5 GB/s). These numbers should improve a bit as faster, lower-latency PCIe 4.0 SSDs become available.

HighPoint NVMe RAID Adapters
Model SSD7505 SSD7540 SSD7580 SSD7140
Host Interface PCIe 4.0 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
Downstream Ports 4x M.2 8x M.2 8x U.2 8x M.2
MSRP $599 $999 $999 $699

Now that consumer M.2 NVMe SSDs are available in 4TB and 8TB capacities, these RAID products can accommodate up to 64TB of storage at a much lower price per TB than using enterprise SSDs, and without requiring a system with U.2 drive bays. For tasks like audio and video editing workstations, that’s an impressive amount of local storage capacity and throughput. The lower write endurance of consumer SSDs (even QLC drives) is generally less of a concern for workstations than for servers that are busy around the clock, and for many use cases having a capacity of tens of TB means the array as a whole has plenty of write endurance even if the individual drives have low DWPD ratings. Using consumer SSDs also means that peak performance is higher than for many enterprise SSDs, and a large RAID-0 array of consumer SSDs will have a total SLC cache size in the TB range.

The SSD7140 (8x M.2, PCIe gen3) and the SSD7505 (4x M.2, PCIe gen4) have already hit the market and the SSD7540 (8x M.2, PCIe gen4) is shipping this month. The SSD7580 (8x U.2, PCIe gen4) is planned to be available next month.

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November 12, 2020 at 04:14PM

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There’s Something Super Weird About Netflix Anime

https://www.wired.com/story/theres-something-super-weird-about-netflix-anime


Cultural purity, however, is not commercial purity. Anime as an artform has always been influenced by business interests. To make room for commercials, episodes last 20 minutes exactly and pace the plot around short breaks. Toy, merch, music, and DVD makers have traditionally been at the table deciding what manga gets the anime treatment to begin with. Ten years ago, anime that could be spun into a cute, popular pachinko machine was likelier to get greenlit. Japanese norms around workflow, too, impact the look and feel of anime: overworked and underpaid employees and freelancers churning out frame after hand-drawn frame under intense deadlines. And because Japanese studios are making more anime than ever, to ease the workload, many are beginning to rely on CGI in lieu of traditional art, giving action-figure texture to a fight scene or gravitas to a slow pan of some big sword.

With DVDs on their way out, streaming platforms are now the be-all, end-all of anime production. As such, anime is contorting again. “There’s two ways of making anime in Japan now,” Sudo, the anime industry journalist, tells me. “One is the traditional way, what we call ‘media mix’ in Japan, where we have anime, manga, and goods all being sold at the same time.” Sudo says that Crunchyroll and Funimation, which cater to Western otaku, fall into the “media mix” category. The other category—brand new—is the made-for-Netflix model.

As a company, Netflix wants to be something for everyone, everywhere. So part of its strategy has been to suck modern hits from across the ocean, like a data-driven Scylla— Naruto, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, One Piece, Haikyu!!. Nothing odd about that; it’s pure distribution.

But the other, more interesting part of the equation is the anime Netflix is exclusively streaming, producing, or making on its own. A Netflix spokesperson claims the company doesn’t keep an official tally on what’s licensed versus produced, but there seem to be roughly 40 series the platform markets as “original.” In 2014, before Sakurai was brought on, Netflix released its first original series, Knights of Sidonia, an entirely CG-animated space opera cell shaded to appear 2D. It’s mecha-monster mania, not beautiful, but not cynical either. It’s reminiscent of beloved anime like Gundam Wing, and well-paced, too. Aside from the 3D animation style, there is no question that it is an anime in the anime tradition.

Four years later came Devilman Crybaby, a phantasmagoric, mind-bending masterpiece. (Many might say Neo Yokio, Jaden Smith’s American-Japanese animated series, should be noted here as well; others will argue it does not belong in this essay at all.) Some were led to believe Netflix would continue releasing anime too edgy to fit neatly anywhere else. It wasn’t so. Although Devilman was a cannonball leap into the adult end of an acid-laced swimming pool—entirely too “mature” and “artsy” for, say, Crunchyroll’s roster—what followed trended in the opposite direction.

It began to dawn on me when I was watching The Great Pretender, a Netflix original from earlier this year that is eerily, heinously likable, to a degree that almost feels engineered, that Netflix was attempting to broaden anime’s scope. Its protagonist, Makoto Edamura, is a Japanese con-man who graduates from small-time crime to the drug-fueled endorphin circus that is Los Angeles, where he and some charismatic pros pull off big swindles. There’s hijinks in Singapore and fraud in London. It’s very international, very “something for everyone.” Review headlines write themselves: “thrilling,” “fast-paced,” “kickass.” It’s good. It’s gorgeous, actually. It’s also a little canned.

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November 12, 2020 at 06:09AM