Preview of first PCIe 5.0 SSD shows speeds of 10GB/s
A preview of a 2TB NVMe drive based on Phison’s Gen5 controller, the PS5026-E26, has been released. This is the first preview of a PCIe 5.0 SSD and according to the findings, a speed of almost 10GB/s is achieved with a certain benchmark.
The mentioned speed was measured by The SSD Review during a Crystal Disk Mark benchmark, which largely concerns incompressible data. A read and write speed of 10098.8MB/s and 10225.7MB/s respectively were achieved. These speeds are slightly lower with the AS SSD benchmark, which works entirely on the basis of incompressible data and is in that sense the toughest test for an SSD. This benchmark measured a read speed of 7747.8MB/s and a write speed of 8990.7MB/s.
In addition to the measured speeds, it is striking that this reference model is supplied with active cooling. The SSD Review refers to previous statements from Phison based on the expectation that Gen5 SSDs might need to be actively cooled, because the data travels back and forth so much faster. However, this appears not to be so bad based on the first test.
A fairly high temperature of 82 degrees Celsius was measured in the ASRock Z690 Velocita motherboard with integrated M.2 slot for Gen5 SSDs, but the SSD still ran very well in combination with the included active heatsink. Presumably 82 degrees Celsius was reached because the heat could only escape on one side of the SSD. In addition, the SSD was tested in an ASUS Maximus Z790 Hero motherboard with the accompanying Rog Hyper M.2 Card and only 43 degrees Celsius was measured.
It is likely that many products based on this reference model will be shown at the CES fair this week and will then actually become available later this year. Last could have been the year of Gen5 SSDs, but manufacturers often turned out to be silent. The new platforms from AMD (AM5) and Intel (LGA1700 socket) did not really help either. Alder Lake, the first generation of Intel CPUs for the LGA1700 socket, turned out to be not really suitable for Gen5 SSDs and the AM5 platform led to more motherboards with Gen5 support for the M.2 slots, but this platform only appeared at the end September last year. The total number of motherboards with support for the new generation is currently around 85 pieces, which is still not a lot.
Controller manufacturer Phison already demonstrated the PS5026-E26 controller in May last year; with a prototype SSD based on this controller, read and write speeds of around 12.5 and 10GB/s were achieved. This controller enables a maximum throughput speed of 15.8GB/s, which is twice as fast as SSDs with a PCIe 4.0 x4 controller.