# Gen 5 NVMe's are fast

Date: 5 April 2026

Summary: EC2 disk speed benchmarks.

Canonical HTML: https://irvyn.us/writing/gen-5-nvme/

I wrote a quick benchmark over the weekend to piece the parts together (implementation details dont matter much for this sake) - grafana and a few `.tf` files to spin up and config the EC2's. 

https://github.com/1rvyn/irvyn-puffer

Its quite self explanatory, my motivation behind it

## Architecture

My laptop triggers the run, two "writers" stream live 8-channel "audio" (just ffmpeg generated audio), and the target EC2 instance does the ingest and flush work (100ms).

![Benchmark architecture overview](https://irvyn.us/writing/gen-5-nvme/arch.png)

That layout is what let me compare instance types without hiding the write path behind extra layers. The target instance and the writer nodes are doing the real work; everything else is just orchestration and observability.

## 32-conccurent audio streams run

Yellow = ? guess
Green = ? 

The p95 means added latency PER chunk of 100ms getting wrote to disk - in a realworld scenario its likely more total delay since you would often upload 100ms chunks to a WS then recieve text response from external STT service (so its quite crucial we keep the `flush_p95` low) 

At the end of the day this is a synthetic benchmark, not too accurate and just looks to measure the "latency" around writing 100ms chunks when conccurency is high. Single instance monoliths can stream a _LOT_ of audio in reality...

![32-channel benchmark dashboard](https://irvyn.us/writing/gen-5-nvme/wav-8chan-32x.png)

## 16 run

![16-channel benchmark dashboard](https://irvyn.us/writing/gen-5-nvme/wav-8chan-16x.png)

The `i7i` and `t3` are relatively close on lower runs (still a decent delta)

## Local NVMe sanity check

Motivation for this (this is from the recently released apple M5 disks - the extremely expensive 8TB option has more chips on its NVMe so is the only variant capable - also a few thousand £ extra...)

![MacBook Pro local NVMe result](https://irvyn.us/writing/gen-5-nvme/mac-m5-max-nvme-5.webp)



## AWS storage comparison

A post from a Planetscale employee who motivated me to run this benchmark:

![R7i gp3 versus i7i NVMe throughput comparison](https://irvyn.us/writing/gen-5-nvme/r7i%20gp3%20vs%20i7i%20nvme.jpeg)


## Instance details

![i7i.large instance pricing and shape](https://irvyn.us/writing/gen-5-nvme/Screenshot%202026-04-04%20at%2011.18.40.png)

![i7i family storage limits and bandwidth table](https://irvyn.us/writing/gen-5-nvme/Screenshot%202026-04-04%20at%2012.19.02.png)