Consumer PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives finally hit the US market this week. It’s been over a year since the first client PC platforms supporting PCIe Gen5 became available. The new drives offer higher performance than the flagship PCIe 4 drives they replace, albeit with tradeoffs such as higher price and the need for proper cooling. On the other hand, for better or worse, the current crop of drives is largely an interim solution. When faster NAND becomes readily available later this year, drive vendors will be able to launch even faster drives based on the same controller.
Now up to 10 GB/s at $170/TB
Gigabyte and Inland (Micro Center brand) are the first to offer PCIe Gen5 consumer SSDs in the US Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen5 10,000 and Inland’s TD510 drives come in 2TB configurations with up to 10GB/s sequential read speeds , the maximum speed is rated. 9.5GB/s sequential write speed. Compared to the 7GB/s or so limit of high-end PCIe 4 drives, this is a noticeable improvement in sequential read speed for the same form factor.
Both drives are powered by Phison’s PS5026-E26 controller (Arm Cortex-R5 core, dedicated CoXProcessor 2.0 accelerator, LDPC, 8 NAND channels with ONFI 5.x and Toggle 5.x interfaces, up to 2400 MT/s data transfer rate). ) and 3D TLC NAND memory. To maintain high performance levels even under heavy load, Gigabyte equipped her SSD with a massive passive cooling system with heat pipes.
Gigabyte built its own drives, but the drives sold by Inland/MicroCenter are believed to have been made by (or at least under his supervision) Phison himself. The company not only offers turnkey solutions with controllers with firmware and reference designs, but can also manufacture actual his SSDs and allow partners to resell them under their own brand. Compared to gigabyte drives, inland drives come with a fairly compact cooling system, but they are equipped with small fans that can be expected to make quite a bit of noise (small fans are usually does not).
These are the first PCIe Gen5 SSDs for client PCs to hit the market, with 2TB of raw 3D NAND memory, so it’s no surprise that they are very expensive. Amazon and Newegg charged $340 per drive, but the units they owned quickly sold out. Micro Center offers that product for $399, but soon he’ll discount it by $50, and after it’s back in stock, he’ll have it for $349.
But faster drives incoming
These current drives are already hitting 10GB/s read, as is common with first-generation products, but performance is still a work in progress. The NAND needed to get the most out of the Phison E26 controller only recently became available (and there was only a small amount at the time), and while these first drives were fast, the overall throttled by NAND throughput.
After Phison officially announced the PS5026-E26 controller in September 2021, it repeatedly demoed a prototype of an E26-powered SSD with 12.5 GB/s read and 10.2 GB/s write. In fact, many company partners such as MSI have announced his E26-based drives with similar performance characteristics, but Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen5 10,000 and Inland’s TD510 got off to a slightly slower start instead. .
Internally, an 8-channel NAND pulling from an E26 controller requires a NAND running at 2400 MT/s to saturate its own internal throughput. These data rates have only recently been made available via NAND built to the new Toggle NAND 5.0 and ONFi 5.0 standards. Micron’s ONFi 5.0 232-layer 3D TLC NAND chips were used in Phison’s prototype drives, but although Micron is generally slowly ramping up production of his 232-layer NAND, the company’s 2400 MT/s delayed the launch of a 232-layer NAND that works with Phison, on the other hand, has yet to validate SK Hynix’s 2400 MT/s NAND with its controller.
As a result, the lack of availability of 2400 MT/s NAND forces SSD manufacturers to use 1600 MT/s NAND in PCIe Gen5 SSDs for now. As faster NAND became more readily available, they used them to reach 12.3 GB/s and took full advantage of the E26 controller to outperform this early generation drive’s You will be able to build E26 based drives.
