There are currently no PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the market right now, which is understandable considering that your gaming PC probably doesn’t support the interface standard. However, the era of faster solid state drives has officially begun, and the future certainly looks fast.
Announced today at Computex, the Apacer A2280F5 and Zadak TWSG5 are the first ever PCIe 5.0 SSDs. While the storage devices may have names that you’ll be slow to remember, they boast blisteringly fast read speeds of 13,000MB/s and writes of 12,000MB/s. For context, these drives are almost twice as quick as the best SSDs for gaming currently available.
The major difference between theese SSDs comes down to their cooling solution, as the Apacer uses “high-quality metal cooling fins” versus the graphene or aluminium heatsinks available for the Zadak drive. Both devices should be more than enough for most systems though and are primed to use Microsoft DirectStorage. They each have five-year global warranties too for peace of mind.
We don’t yet know how much either drive will cost, but they should be available to purchase later this year, likely coinciding with the launch of AMD Zen 4 CPUs. Either way, you’ll need one of the best gaming motherboards for Ryzen 7000 or 12th Gen Intel Core processors to get the most out of these SSDs, but you can use them in PCIe 4.0 systems too, albeit at slower speeds.