Significantly faster SSDs will become available in 2022 thanks to the impending arrival of the PCIe 5.0 standard, and with CES around the corner, one company has teased its first PCIe Gen 5 M.2 SSDs.
Adata, a Taiwanese memory and storage manufacturer, confirmed its presence for CES 2022, an upcoming technology conference where companies showcase their latest products. Adata in particular will unveil product lines ranging from DDR5 memory to gaming peripherals.
Another product it will introduce at the event on January 5 is its PCIe 5.0 solid-state drives. Specifically, Adata will present two PCIe Gen 5 SSD prototype samples, Project Nighthawk and Project Blackbird.
These SSDs will be capable of sequential read bandwidth speeds up to 14GB per second and write speeds up to 12GB/s. Additional models featuring read speeds of 12GB/s and 10GB/s were also mentioned in the press release.
Both M.2 SSDs will be based on the NVMe 2.0 standard, which is the most popular interface technology used by SSDs. In addition to utilizing the PCIe Gen 5 x4 interface, the drives will offer a capacity of up to 8TB.
As VideoCardz points out, there is no desktop platform currently available that is compatible with M.2 PCIe Gen 5. The only exception is the primary PCIe Gen 5 x16 slots found on the LGA1700-based Intel Z690 motherboards. Therefore, a PCIe to M.2 adapter would be necessary for Adata’s PCIe Gen 5 storage to function. Motherboards that directly support M.2 Gen 5 slots will most likely become available throughout 2022.
With the launch of Intel’s 12th-gen Alder Lake processors, the latest generation of technology for PCs has ushered in both the DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 standards. It’s not surprising then that companies have begun to reveal products that will support the latest protocols. Samsung, for example, has teased PCIe 5.0 SSDs that are set for a launch during the second quarter of 2022.
Kioxia, meanwhile, has also shown its own PCIe 5.0 prototype SSD that reaches 14 GB/s of sequential read speed, as well as a write speed of 7GB/s. Thanks to the new standard, the drive offers more than a 100% increase in read speeds, in addition to 67% faster write speeds over the Gen 4 PCIe standard.
Due to the substantially higher speeds, expect SSD coolers to become more prevalent. Most recently, ElecGear released an M.2 2280 SSD cooler that lowers the temperatures of high-end SSDs by up to 25 degrees Celsius.