Gigabyte Introduces PCIe 5.0 Plug-in Card for Four M.2 SSDs

Gigabyte introduces an Aorus Gen 5 AIC plug-in card for SSDs. This card can accommodate four PCIe 5.0-M.2 SSDs in a RAID array and can be placed in a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot on the motherboard. The company does not share a suggested retail price or release date.

The Aorus Gen5 AIC supports four SSDs for a maximum total capacity of 16TB, writes Gigabyte. The card achieves theoretical bandwidths of up to 60GB/s when using a RAID 0 configuration. Users can combine four different PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the plug-in card. The Aorus Gen 5 AIC is also backwards compatible with PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0, but of course delivers lower speeds. With the previous Aorus Gen4 AIC, Gigabyte also introduced variants with pre-installed SSDs, but the manufacturer does not mention this with the Gen5 model yet.

The card also features an active cooler with a single fan. Gigabyte provides the card with eight integrated temperature sensors that can be used to control the speed of that fan. The Aorus Gen5 AIC can be used on platforms with PCIe 5.0. Intel offers that PCIe version with its current Alder Lake processors and the Z690 chipset. AMD will announce its Ryzen 7000 CPUs next week, which will also get PCIe 5.0 support.

In practice, there are no M.2 SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 interface available for consumers yet, but that seems to be about to change. Gigabyte previously posted a teaser for an Aorus Gen 5 10000 SSD, which, according to the company, achieves maximum sequential read speeds of over 12GB/s. Also Corsair hinted at the arrival earlier from an MP700 SSD with PCIe 5.0 interface and read speeds of up to 10GB/s. A Samsung 990 Pro previously appeared at PCI-SIG, the organization that oversees the PCIe standard. Other manufacturers, such as Adata, Apacer and Team Group, already showed PCIe 5.0 SSDs. However, no concrete release dates are known for all these SSDs.