We’ve been hearing about PCIe 5.0 for years now, and although the first PCIe 5.0-ready PCs with Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs are starting to ship in late 2021, they’re still on sale. I haven’t seen a drive yet. Over the past few years, the best SSDs (or at least the fastest SSDs) have typically used the PCIe 4.0 interface, and many good drives are still available with “only” PCIe 3.0 connectivity. But with the fastest SSDs hitting the throughput cap with PCIe 4.0 x4 connections for over three years and only incremental improvements, it’s about time we needed something faster.
There are multiple M.2 PCIe 5.0 SSDs due to ship this year, with the first model appearing to be the Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 10000. This can deliver up to 10,000 MB/s, as its name ingeniously suggests. Earlier rumors suggested the drive could achieve 12,000 MB/s read and 10,000 MB/s write, so performance was clearly dominated while the product was being prepped for retail.
The Gigabyte Aorus SSD uses the Phison E26 controller. This will become common in many upcoming models. Silicon Motion is working on a new SM2508 controller that could improve overall performance, but it’s a little further out and may not ship this year. Another notable thing about the Aorus is the huge heatsink that comes with the drive. This also seems to be the case for all other Gen5 SSD prototypes we’ve seen so far. Obviously, these new drives run just a tad warmer.
Gigabyte drives are now listed Amazon (opens in new tab) and new egg (opens in new tab)the latter is currently sold out, but the former is only available from third-party marketplace sellers, a whopping $679.89 for the 2TB model. Nor does it reflect the expected MSRP as the drive becomes more widely available.
Another PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSD available today is the Inland TD510 2TB, available at Microcenter for just $349.99. The Inland is Microcenter’s own brand drive, and while the cooler that comes with the SSD isn’t as big as the Aorus, it does have a small fan for active cooling.The fan is pretty loud for something this small. In other words, it’s not a great feature because it could.
Like the Aorus 10000, the Inland TD510 uses the Phison E26 controller and has the same 10,000 MB/s read and 9,500 MB/s write specs. Gigabyte doesn’t currently list random read/write speeds, but Microcenter’s page lists up to 1.5 million IOPS read and 1.25 million IOPS write on Inland drives. Both drives have an endurance of 1,400 TBW and a read/write power of about 11W.
How does the drive perform in real use? This is something I can’t rate yet but I’m working to get these new upcoming M.2 Gen5 drives available for review. Probably this year With DirectStorage showing up in even more games in the second half, there may actually be some added speed advantage for more casual users.
