SSD manufacturers Apacer and Zadak have shown their first PCIe 5.0 consumer SSDs. The companies say they will release it at the end of this year. The SSDs achieve read and write speeds of 13 and 12 GB/s. That’s double that of PCIe 4.0 SSDs.
The Apacer AS2280F5 and the Zadak TWSG5 are M.2 SSDs with NVMe 2.0 support that use four PCIe 5.0 lanes. Both SSDs are equipped with a heatsink for passive cooling. Zadak also supplies an alternative thin graphene heatsink.
Apacer notes that its PCIe 5.0 SSD is also backwards compatible with PCIe 4.0, but only achieves half the speed. The manufacturers have not yet disclosed details about the memory chips and controller used. Nor is it known in what capacities the SSDs will be available and what they will cost.
The Intel Z690 platform launched last year already supports PCIe 5.0 SSDs. However, these are currently not available to consumers. AMD’s upcoming AM5 platform also has support for PCIe 5.0 SSDs. That applies to the X670E, X670 and B650 chipsets. The AM5 platform will appear in the fall, along with the Ryzen 7000 processors.
AMD announced earlier this week that PCIe 5.0 SSDs from various manufacturers will appear around that time. At the beginning of this year, Team Group also showed a PCIe 5.0 SSD and Adata showed prototypes of PCIe 5.0 SSDs that would reach speeds of up to 14GB/s.