First PCIe 5.0 SSDs touch down with blazing speeds, big heatsinks, and high prices

Shawn Knight

Posts: 15,256   +192
Staff member
In a nutshell: Solid-state drives compatible with the latest PCIe 5.0 standard are starting to trickle down to retailers. As with most cutting-edge hardware, expect to pay a pretty penny to play ball and don't be surprised if you come across an absurd requirement or two along the way.

The Micro Center-exclusive Inland TD510 is a 2TB PCIe Gen 5 NVMe M.2 SSD rated for up to 10,000 MB/s reads and 9,500 MB/s writes. It's reportedly good for 1,400 TBW and comes backed by a generous six-year warranty. Notably, the drive also ships with a sizable heatsink that is actively cooled. Unfortunately, the product listing doesn't mention specs for the fan nor does it seem to ship with a fan speed controller.

Gigabyte's Aorus Gen5 SSD is another newcomer. We profiled this extreme SSD last month, highlighting its Phison E26 controller and 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash that's capable of sequential read speeds up to 10,000 MB/s and sequential writes up to 9,500 MB/s in the 2TB flavor. The 1TB version is no slouch either, with sequential read speeds of up to 9,500 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 8,500 MB/s.

Some may scoff at the high cost of these new drives, and rightfully so. The 2TB Inland drive is listed at $349.99. The Gigabyte drive is out of stock as of writing but according to Ars Technica, it typically goes for around $340 when in stock. For comparison, Samsung's 980 Pro PCIe Gen 4.0 2TB drive commands just $159.99. It's not as fast – just 7,000 MB/s read and 5,100 MB/s write – but that's still plenty quick for most users.

Speaking of raw speed, most high-end Gen 5 drives are going to be overkill in many situations. Then again, enthusiasts often favor the absolute fastest products on the market and these are among them.

Another concern is the extreme cooling requirements – more specifically, potential compatibility issues that large heatsinks could introduce. If eyeballing a new drive with a big heatsink, ensure it'll clear nearby components and expansion cards before placing your order.

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Huh, I paid $349 for Samsung's 980 Pro PCIe Gen 4.0 2TB, nearly 2 years ago. Back then, it had little competition. Now the situation is very different, I wouldn't pay that much for such a drive anymore, at least not for one that promises only 25% speed improvement, which would be unnoticeable.
 
Huh, I paid $349 for Samsung's 980 Pro PCIe Gen 4.0 2TB, nearly 2 years ago. Back then, it had little competition. Now the situation is very different, I wouldn't pay that much for such a drive anymore, at least not for one that promises only 25% speed improvement, which would be unnoticeable.
This is only the beginning of gen 5 SSDs but I'd say they're already ridiculously fast. Theoretically they can have speeds upwards of 16GB/s which I can't think of a consumer application that would need that. Boot times and loading games are nearly instant on gen 3 SSDs so I can't see a use case for this. Having them be actively cooled is another thing, I don't care how fast they are. Those are some serious heat sinks in those pictures. At least with a 4090 there is an immediate, tangible improvement in performance with what your getting, what's being bottlenecked by NVME speed?
 
Feel like we've passed the point of diminishing returns long ago, at least until the software can actually make use of the speeds these drives offer. Direct IO is one that is actually going to make these drives make sense.

Honestly going from regular SSD to early gen NVME was maybe the biggest improvement I could feel in terms of system responsiveness, after that every NVME drive upgrade barely felt faster, GEN 3 to GEN 4 particularly was the least noticeable improvement yet, going to GEN 5... I don't see the point right now other then for the usual bragging rights people seem to be after, and the my "this" is faster/bigger than yours...
 
These just epitomise high end consumer PC hardware at the moment. Crazy. The absurd cooling and late release looks like trouble. Cheaper cooler varients needed before they're even on the radar.

A 2gb gen 4 drive at today's prices looks like a much better deal.

 
The leap from HDD to SSD was crazy. From SATA SSD to NVME also big. But from gen3 to gen4 barely can fell the difference. I don't have gen5 board but I'm sure I'm not missing anything for the moment. I will get one once GPU's are into gen5.
 
I'm sure it's great for editing or any read/write intensive workloads.

When talking about NVME, gamers fall into the 'most users' category here.

Gen 5 came out, and I picked up a 4TB gen 3, couldn't be happier after doing a little research on my day to day workloads.
 
For normal day to day stuff, I can't tell the difference between my SATA SSD and Nvme 4.0 drives and they all operate at their "rated" speeds
Yes for OS load times and desktop apps I can't tell the difference also. Not when installing games or file transfer, that it's the only improvement for me.
 
This is only the beginning of gen 5 SSDs but I'd say they're already ridiculously fast. Theoretically they can have speeds upwards of 16GB/s which I can't think of a consumer application that would need that. Boot times and loading games are nearly instant on gen 3 SSDs so I can't see a use case for this. Having them be actively cooled is another thing, I don't care how fast they are. Those are some serious heat sinks in those pictures. At least with a 4090 there is an immediate, tangible improvement in performance with what your getting, what's being bottlenecked by NVME speed?

640 KB of ram should be enough for anyone.
 
640 KB of ram should be enough for anyone.
I get the reference l, thank you, but this is a non equivalent argument. These drives are getting into ram levels of speed but have serious latency issues. Issues that Intel optane was trying to solve but didn't have enough market share to be profitable. So we have drives that are super fast but have latency issues but CPUs(looking at you, amd) that are sensitive to latency.
 
I'm not a candidate for anything faster than what I have in my gaming PC.
I'll be good with single 500GB Gen 3 nVME and larger SATA 3 drives for a while yet.

The large read and write figures on the box are the mostest bestest possible scenario. Most users work with queue depths closer to 1 and will never see anything close to 3K, 5K or 7K Mbps read and write speeds. For that same reason I stay away from the more expensive drives like Samsung. Solid drives, but not worth the premium imo anyway.
 
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Useless....! Speed Up... Heat Up...! Even with a heat sink, those certainly don't go well together...!
 
Between my 4090, 13900 and now this, it’s no wonder I can’t pay my student loans.
Assuming you had computer classes, you should have bought those devices with your student loan monies. That way, there's at least a slim chance that Biden would have paid them off for you.

Either that, or you should have done some introspection before you purchased them, to try and differentiate between, "want", and, "need".
 
No one writes here, but SSDs have a fundamental dead end in terms of speed in 4k iops. Reading speed in 4k blocks is already 100 times worse than in large ones.
 
640 KB of ram should be enough for anyone.
This made me chuckle, good reference, but in all honesty I still don't see the point of these because like... Turning my boot time from 15 seconds into what, 11 seconds? Not gonna pay several hundred dollars for that. And, as others have said, the IO for small files is pretty flat across the board, so it just doesn't make sense as anything other than a marketing product to me.
 
The leap from HDD to SSD was crazy. From SATA SSD to NVME also big. But from gen3 to gen4 barely can fell the difference. I don't have gen5 board but I'm sure I'm not missing anything for the moment. I will get one once GPU's are into gen5.

I agree at the PCIe 3 vs 4 speed difference... which makes me feel a little fake when I talk about such things elsewhere.

I mean, I have 3.5Tb of PCIe 4 (all 980 Pro) rn, only for gaming, 500Gb OS drive, 2Tb in second mobo slot for priority/large AAA's and a 1Tb in a spare PCIe x8/16 slot via adaptor (which is slightly slower, at 6500MB/s r/w instead of 7000) Yeah, I kinda went OTT on that and, tbf, the difference with PCIe 3 is some 5 seconds at absolute most ever... SATA SSD (870 EVO, for example) being 2-3 times longer and HDD's being at least another 2-3 times that etc. Those 980 Pro's were all bought on deals so closer to regular PCIe 3 prices.

Maybe just personally a reaction to not buying, much less using any HDD for a number of years now (2019 for the former, a laptop that came with one that I swapped for an 850 EVO right away, and 2016 for the latter, first desktop in a decade with SM961's only) Literally every system in the house, a desktop and laptop each for me and gf) has the best gen storage it can handle to date. But with the desktop having two SATA SSD's still going strong after years of use and moved over from older gaming laptops they originally replaced the HDD's in, I'm of the mind that by the time these NVME's fail or get too slow, gen 5 (or later?) will be more nicely priced.

But yeah, for most fast gaming storage in a serious PC, PCIe 3 is absolutely fine. The line for me, gaming wise, is between that and SATA, no compromises there. In that I'm on par with current consoles at least compared to a good number of folks I see with high end specs (CPU, GPU etc) but still using HDD's... and often complaining about slow loads in game discussions...
 
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