Samsung has a PCIe 5.0 SSD already announced that will beat out just about every SSD solution out there (for now) and mark the path for what’s to come next year. It is the new Samsung PM1743 NVMe SSD and it offers speeds of up to 13,000 MB/s, destroying every PCIe 4.0 model in the market right now (that are already faster than anything we had ever seen).
Drive technology has hit the ground running since we broke past SATA SSDs and into NVMe and PCIe. Since then, companies have made one ground-breaking improvement after another, providing the biggest speed improvements that have ever existed for digital storage.
Now, these drives have pretty much marked every other part of the system as a bottleneck since it’s incredibly difficult to actually take full advantage of the speeds these drives have to offer. I’d say we are in a pretty good place when it comes to data transfer performance.
Now, with PCIe 5.0, these companies take things even further, nearly doubling the speed of some of the fastest PCIe 4.0 options out there. Samsung is one of the first to deliver with its PM1743 SSD and others are likely to start announcing options short.
Not only is this new SSD incredibly fast, but it will also be offered in capacities of up to 15.36TB, allowing them to compete a little more freely with HDD capacities. Price tags of course will still be an issue when compared to HDD options. The gap between HDD and SSD is so wide now when it comes to speed that it is going to be hard to see high capacity SSDs hit a fair price for a while.
You won’t likely be buying into these anyway as they are targeting enterprise users for environments like data centers. However, it does shed light on what’s to come for everyone else. These drives will be hitting the market Q1 of 2022, so you can bet we might actually see PCIe 5.0 solutions for consumers by the end of the year (2022).
