Preview of first PCIe 5.0 SSD shows speeds at 10GB/s
A 2TB NVMe drive based on the Phisons Gen5 controller, the PS5026-E26, has been previewed. This is the first preview of a PCIe 5.0 SSD and according to the findings, a speed of almost 10GB / s is achieved in a certain benchmark.
The mentioned speed was measured by The SSD Review during a Crystal Disk Mark benchmark, which is largely uncompressible data. A read and write speed of 10098.8 MB/s and 10225.7 MB/s respectively were achieved. These speeds are slightly lower with the AS SSD benchmark, which works entirely on the basis of uncompressible data and in that sense is the toughest test for an SSD. In this benchmark a read speed of 7747.8MB/s was measured 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 by Phison that it was expected that Gen5 SSDs might need to be actively cooled because the data moves back and forth so much faster. However, this appears to be less than expected 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 from 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, which will then become available later this year. Last year could have been the year of Gen5 SSDs, but manufacturers often turned out to watch the cat out of the tree. The new platforms from AMD (AM5) and Intel (LGA1700 socket) didn’t really help either. Alder Lake, the first generation of Intel CPUs for the LGA1700 socket, turned out not to be very suitable for Gen5 SSDs and the AM5 platform provided more motherboards with Gen5 support for the M.2 slots, but this platform did not appear until late September last year. The total number of motherboards with support for the new generation is currently about 85, which is not much.
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 10 GB/s were achieved. This controller enables a maximum throughput of 15.8GB/s, which is twice the speeds achieved by SSDs with a PCIe 4.0 x4 controller.