Even faster PC storage drives are on the horizon. Japanese memory maker Kioxia is preparing a new PCIe Gen 5.0 SSD that can reach 14,000MB/s in read speeds.
The company briefly previewed the upcoming product during the China Flash Market Summit earlier this month. The NVME drive is designed for enterprise servers and slated to arrive in Q4. Nevertheless, the technology shows we can expect a sizable upgrade over the latest consumer-based PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 SSD drives, which max out at around 7,000MB/s in read speeds.
Kioxia’s Gen 5.0 SSDs feature 32Gbps per data lane, an increase from 16Gbps. The company also managed to decrease the latency for both read and write speeds. But on the downside, Kioxia’s upcoming PCIe Gen 5.0 technology can only achieve write speeds at 7,000MB/s, which is on par with the fastest rival Gen 4.0 drives.
Currently, the latest PCs only support PCIe Gen 4.0. But Intel’s next CPU family, Alder Lake, is going to feature PCIe Gen 5.0, along with DDR5 RAM, when it launches in Q4.
We’ll have to wait and see how the next-generation storage technology performs. But a challenge facing existing PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD drives is that they generate heat when running at top speeds, which can bottleneck the data processing. As a result, memory vendors have been coming up with innovative cooling solutions.
Kioxia’s first PCIe Gen 5.0 SSD will arrive with storage capacities ranging from 2TB to 8TB in Q4. The company is preparing a second product for 2022 with capacities from 1.6TB to 15TB.