Consumer PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives finally hit the US market this week. It’s been over a year since the first client PC platforms supporting PCIe Gen5 became available. The new drives offer higher performance than the flagship PCIe 4 drives they replace, albeit with tradeoffs such as higher price and the need for proper cooling. On the other hand, for better or worse, the current crop of drives is largely an interim solution. When faster NAND becomes readily available later this year, drive vendors will be able to launch even faster drives based on the same controller.
Now up to 10 GB/s at $170/TB
Gigabyte and Inland (Micro Center brand) are the first to offer PCIe Gen5 consumer SSDs in the US Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen5 10,000 and Inland’s TD510 drives come in 2TB configurations with up to 10GB/s sequential read speeds , the maximum speed is rated. 9.5GB/s sequential write speed. Compared to the 7GB/s or so limit of high-end PCIe 4 drives, this is a noticeable improvement in sequential read speed for the same form factor.
Both drives are based on Phison drives. PS5026-E26 Controller (Arm Cortex-R5 core, dedicated CoXProcessor 2.0 accelerator, LDPC, 8 NAND channels with ONFI 5.x and Toggle 5.x interfaces at data transfer rates up to 2400 MT/s) and 3D TLC NAND memory. To maintain high performance levels even under heavy load, Gigabyte has equipped the SSD with a massive passive cooling system with heat pipes.
Gigabyte built its own drives, but the drives sold by Inland/MicroCenter are believed to have been made by (or at least under his supervision) Phison himself. The company not only offers turnkey solutions with controllers with firmware and reference designs, but can also manufacture actual his SSDs and allow partners to resell them under their own brand. Compared to gigabyte drives, inland drives come with a much more compact cooling system, but they are equipped with small fans that can be expected to make quite a bit of noise (small fans are not is not).
These are the first PCIe Gen5 SSDs for client PCs to hit the market, with 2TB of raw 3D NAND memory, so it’s no surprise that they are very expensive. Amazon and new egg We charged $340 per drive, but the units we owned sold out quickly. micro center offers that product for $399, but with a quick $50 discount, you can get it for $349 when it’s back in stock.
But faster drives incoming
These current drives are already hitting 10GB/s read, as is common with first-generation products, but performance is still a work in progress. The NAND needed to get the most out of the Phison E26 controller only recently became available (and there was only a small amount at the time), and while these first drives were fast, the overall throttled by NAND throughput.
After officially unveiling the PS5026-E26 controller in September 2021, Phison demoed a prototype of an E26-powered SSD. 12.5 GB/s read, 10.2 GB/s write A number of times. In fact, many of the company’s partners, such as MSI, announced E26-based drives with similar performance characteristics, but Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen5 10,000 and Inland’s TD510 start a bit slower instead.
Internally, an 8-channel NAND pulling from an E26 controller requires a NAND running at 2400 MT/s to saturate its own internal throughput. These data rates have only recently been made available via NAND built to the new Toggle NAND 5.0 and ONFi 5.0 standards. Micron’s ONFi 5.0 232-layer 3D TLC NAND chips were used in Phison’s prototype drives, but Micron is slowly ramping up production of his 232-layer NAND in general. Delayed ramp of 232-layer NAND running at 2400 MT/sPhison, on the other hand, has yet to validate SK Hynix’s 2400 MT/s NAND with its controller.
As a result, the lack of availability of 2400 MT/s NAND forces SSD manufacturers to use 1600 MT/s NAND in PCIe Gen5 SSDs for now. As faster NAND became more readily available, they used them to reach 12.3 GB/s and took full advantage of the E26 controller to outperform this early generation drive’s You will be able to build E26 based drives.
