U.2 form factor drives (also NVMe protocol) can achieve higher IOPS (particularly writes) still over M.2 form factor (especially M.2 2280), with higher durability, but you'll need your own controllers which are sparse on the market for the moment. Throughput (MB/sec, not IOPS) will be about the same, but the U.2 drives can do it for longer.
U.2 means more NAND to parallelize over, more spare area (and higher overall durability), potentially larger DRAM caches, and a far larger area to dissipate heat. Plus it has all the fancy bleeding-edge features you aren't going to see on consumer-grade drives.
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The big issue with U.2 for "end user" applications like workstations is you can't get drivers from Samsung for things like the PM1733 or PM9A3 (which blow the doors off the 980 Pro, especially for writes and $/GB, plus other neat features like Fail-In-Place) unless you're an SI, in which you also co-developed the firmware. The same goes for SanDisk, KIOXIA and other makers of enterprise SSDs.
The kicker is enterprise U.2 drives are about the same $/GB as SATA drives, but being NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4. blow the doors off about everything. There's also the EDSFF, NF1 and now E.1L form factors, but U.2 is very prevalent. Enterprise SSDs are attractive as that's where the huge volume is (hence the low $/GB), but end-user support is really limited. You can use "generic drivers", but you won't see anywhere near the peak performance of the drives.
The good news is both Micron and Intel have great support for end-users, where you can get optimized drivers and updated firmware. Intel has the D7-P5510 probably hitting VARs and some retail sellers (maybe NewEgg) within about 60 days. Similar throughput to the Samsung drives, far more write IOPS (especially sustained), lower latencies, FAR more durability (with a big warranty), far more capacity, and not too bad a price (looking like ~$800USD for 3.84TB with ~7.2PB of warrantied writes over 5 years).
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My plan once Genesis Peak (Threadripper 5XXX) hits is four 3.84TB Intel D7-P5510s in RAID10, connected to a HighPoint SSD7580 PCIe 4.0 x16 controller. Figure ~$4,000 for a storage setup of ~7.3TB usable space after formatting, 26GB/sec peak writes, ~8GB/sec peak reads, with 2.8M 4K read iops, 700K 4K write iops, and ~14.3PB of warrantied write durability.
How would a model-specific driver for something that speaks NVMe even work? Is it for Linux? Is it open? Is it just modifications to the stock Linux NVMe driver that take some drive specifics into account? Or is it some stupid proprietary NVMe stack?
I think he may have meant you can't get the drives, not the drivers. Samsung, Kioxia, etc. enterprise NVMe SSDs work fine with standard Linux NVMe drivers and I don't think they offer custom NVMe drivers except possibly for Windows. The problem is that their enterprise drives mostly aren't sold at retail. If you aren't buying them as part of a big B2B deal, you simply can't acquire the hardware.
U.2 means more NAND to parallelize over, more spare area (and higher overall durability), potentially larger DRAM caches, and a far larger area to dissipate heat. Plus it has all the fancy bleeding-edge features you aren't going to see on consumer-grade drives.
-- -----
The big issue with U.2 for "end user" applications like workstations is you can't get drivers from Samsung for things like the PM1733 or PM9A3 (which blow the doors off the 980 Pro, especially for writes and $/GB, plus other neat features like Fail-In-Place) unless you're an SI, in which you also co-developed the firmware. The same goes for SanDisk, KIOXIA and other makers of enterprise SSDs.
The kicker is enterprise U.2 drives are about the same $/GB as SATA drives, but being NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4. blow the doors off about everything. There's also the EDSFF, NF1 and now E.1L form factors, but U.2 is very prevalent. Enterprise SSDs are attractive as that's where the huge volume is (hence the low $/GB), but end-user support is really limited. You can use "generic drivers", but you won't see anywhere near the peak performance of the drives.
The good news is both Micron and Intel have great support for end-users, where you can get optimized drivers and updated firmware. Intel has the D7-P5510 probably hitting VARs and some retail sellers (maybe NewEgg) within about 60 days. Similar throughput to the Samsung drives, far more write IOPS (especially sustained), lower latencies, FAR more durability (with a big warranty), far more capacity, and not too bad a price (looking like ~$800USD for 3.84TB with ~7.2PB of warrantied writes over 5 years).
-- -----
My plan once Genesis Peak (Threadripper 5XXX) hits is four 3.84TB Intel D7-P5510s in RAID10, connected to a HighPoint SSD7580 PCIe 4.0 x16 controller. Figure ~$4,000 for a storage setup of ~7.3TB usable space after formatting, 26GB/sec peak writes, ~8GB/sec peak reads, with 2.8M 4K read iops, 700K 4K write iops, and ~14.3PB of warrantied write durability.