Corsair and Gigabyte announce PCI-e 4.0 SSDs

Corsair and Gigabyte have announced the first SSDs with a PCI-e 4.0 interface. The manufacturers claim that the flash drives can achieve sequential read speeds of, theoretically, close to 5000 MB/s.

The Force Series MP600 from Corsair is built from TLC nand memory, has a hefty heatsink and uses a Phison PS5016-E16 controller. The manufacturer claims that the NVME PCI-E 4.0 SSD with m2 2280 form factor achieves sequential read speeds of 4950MB/s and sequential write speeds of 4250MB/s. It is not known what storage quantities the SSD will come out with, but the controller can handle quantities from 512GB to 2TB.

Gigabyte does mention the storage capacity on the product page of its Aorus NVMe Gen4 SSD. It is 2TB, but there are also versions of 1TB and 500GB. This manufacturer is talking about sequential read speeds of 5000MB/s and sequential write speeds of 4400MB/s. The m2-ssd stands out with its copper heat spreader. The size of the heat spreaders makes it clear that the SSDs can get quite warm. Like Corsair’s, the Aorus SSD has a Phison PS5016-E16.

Both SSDs appear in imitation of the AMD X570 chipset with PCI-e 4.0 support. They are compatible with pci-e 3.0, but have to make do with considerably less bandwidth. Announced in 2010, PCI-E 4.0 doubles bandwidth compared to PCI-E 3.0, with an x4 slot from 3.94GB/s to 7.9GB/s.