The first PCIe 5.0 SSDs from Adata and Samsung are on the way

Humza

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Something to look forward to: With CES 2022 just a couple of weeks away, we’re seeing more exciting hardware announcements from event participants. The latest two being Adata and Samsung, who have teased their first PCIe 5.0 drives with next-gen performance figures.

The upcoming CES is showing even more signs of becoming a full-on virtual event, with several big names in the industry pulling out over fears of the latest Omicron variant. However, storage maker Adata has shared that it will be on location in Las Vegas to showcase some of its latest XPG-branded PC hardware.

Among them will be ‘Project Nighthawk’ and ‘Project Blackbird,’ two prototype m.2 PCIe 5.0 SSDs that offer nearly twice the read/write performance of current-gen PCIe 4.0 drives. For Project Nighthawk, which uses a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller, Adata claims sequential speeds of up to 14GB/s reads and 12GB/s writes.

The slightly slower Project Blackbird SSD features an InnoGrit IG5666 controller that offers the same read performance, but up to 10GB/s writes. Adata notes both drives pack up to 8TB of storage capacity. Expect additional details like IOPS performance, thermals, pricing and availability of consumer versions to be revealed during the showcase.

Samsung, which is also attending CES (for now), has revealed its next-gen PM1743 drive. This enterprise-focused PCI 5.0 NVMe SSD uses the company's sixth-gen V-NAND memory and utilizes a proprietary controller to offer up to 13GB/s sequential read (2,500K random read IOPS) and 6.6GB/s writes (250K random write IOPS).

Samsung says the PM1743 delivers up to 608 MB/s per watt, which is 30 percent more power efficient than last-gen SSDs. The upcoming drive will be offered in 2.5-inch and 3-inch EDSFF (E3.S) server-grade versions, and in storage capacities ranging between 1.92TB and 15.36TBs.

Samsung is currently sampling this drive with chipset and server manufacturers and plans to mass-produce it in Q1 2022.

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I'm sure that when I build a new system and upgrade my desktop, my motherboard will support DDR5 and PCIe5.0. SSD.

But to tell you the truth, I am thoroughly happy with SATA SSD and PCIe 4.0 SSD. The only thing I want to see improved is the boot up time in Windows 10 and Windows 11 (once I get it). As far as games go, I doubt I will see major improvements noticeable without benchmark tools. Most of my games are bottlenecked by network connections since they are multiplayer.
 
Ditto “QuantumPhysics”. Truth is, when I’m already happy with what I have, I just can’t justify the prices for an upgrade anymore.
 
Obviously they don't talk about random speeds, Optane launched ages ago and still no SSD can come close to them where it matters.
 
Damn those controller chips now basically look just as the broadcom SoC chips you find on raspberry pi 4 units and probably is a similar or even more robust solution, it's neat that an SSD drive now probably has more computing power on board than your standard full blown pc 15 years or so ago.
 
Ditto “QuantumPhysics”. Truth is, when I’m already happy with what I have, I just can’t justify the prices for an upgrade anymore.


I have an 8-core CPU, 3090 and 32GB DDR4. I have decided not to upgrade it anymore. I'll just wait two or 3 years and build a new PC with double the specs I have now.
 
Funny how hard drives were the component with the slowest development in performance for decades, so software never got too far ahead.

Now we're close to drives that can easily exceed 10GB/s with literally no useful consumer application for all that performance. When it comes to chunks of data throughput like games there is hardly a difference between a 500MB/s SATA drive and a current top end 7GB/s PCIe 4.0 drive.

Oh well. Software will catch up eventually I suppose.
 
On one hand I'm really happy for this, on the other hand it'll allow developers to be even more lazy and incompetent.
 
With current speeds at PCIe4, some NVME's get really hot which is not good for the chips. So with speeds effectively doubled for these PCIe5 parts, active cooling will almost be a necessity. Can you image a dedicated loop or AIO just for your NVME's? That's gonna complicate things for those that want a clean build.
 
I have an 8-core CPU, 3090 and 32GB DDR4. I have decided not to upgrade it anymore. I'll just wait two or 3 years and build a new PC with double the specs I have now.
I'm still on a 4-core 4790k, a 1080GTX, and 16GB DDR3 RAM. My system handles pretty much anything I throw at it except the latest Raytracing games.

I'll finally upgrade to a 12-core Alderlake on Black Friday 2022... by then my CPU & RAM will have been with me for 8 years! Certainly got my money's worth out of them! :)
 
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Pcie 4 had a short reign compared to pcie 3 and even 2. 2.0 was first available I believe in 2007 and lasted until the first pcie 3.0 boards in mid-2011. Then 3.0 lasted until 2019.
Also noticed that general usage and boot times don't seem improved much going from a SATA SSD to pcie 4.0. To benefit you really need a use case that involves shuffling around lots of data sequentially daily. Maybe when DirectStorage is out we'll see more usefulness too.
 
I'm still on a 4-core 4790k and 16GB DDR3 RAM that I bought in 2014. I've upgraded my graphics card a few times since then, currently with a GTX1080 TI. My system handles pretty much anything I throw at it except the latest Raytracing games.

I'll finally upgrade to a 12-core Alderlake on Black Friday 2022... by then my CPU & RAM will have been with me for 8 years! Certainly got my money's worth out of them! :)
You should probably just get Raptor Lake then or see how AMD's AM5 offerings are.
 
Funny how hard drives were the component with the slowest development in performance for decades, so software never got too far ahead.

Now we're close to drives that can easily exceed 10GB/s with literally no useful consumer application for all that performance. When it comes to chunks of data throughput like games there is hardly a difference between a 500MB/s SATA drive and a current top end 7GB/s PCIe 4.0 drive.

Oh well. Software will catch up eventually I suppose.
Gotta wait for DirectStorage I guess. Right now random I/O performance matters more for games, and SATA SSDs are close to nvme in that regard.
 
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