In the high-end PC market, it is vital that the numbers always keep going up. This means higher performance, new specifications and (sometimes) new model numbers for existing components. One of the latest numbers that has gone up is the version number of PCI Express supported by many motherboards; All PCs based on AMD Ryzen 7000 series chips and some PCs using 12th or 13th generation Intel processors support graphics card SSDs using PCI Express 5.0, which is up to two times faster than version 4.0.
But true PCIe 5.0 SSDs are just starting to hit store shelves (via Tom’s Hardware), and like many early-stage products, they seem tailor-made for people with more money than sense. Based on the Phison E26 SSD controller, the Gigabyte Aorus Gen 5 10000 and the exclusive MicroCenter Inland TD510 promise peak read speeds of up to 10,000 MB per second, compared to 7,450 MB per second for the PCIe 4.0-based Samsung 990 Pro.
But both drives have serious drawbacks, even if you have a compatible PC. The 2TB versions cost more than double what you’d pay for a very good PCIe 4.0 drive like the Samsung 980 Pro or WD Black SN850X ; The Gigabyte drive is currently out of stock, but historical pricing data says it sells for $340 when available, while the Inland drive is currently on sale for up to $350 off the regular price of $400.
Another thing is the disc heatsinks, each of which is ridiculous in its own way. The Gigabyte SSD comes with a giant passive heatsink adorned with heatpipes that will run silently but can be large enough to cause compatibility issues depending on your motherboard and where you install it. The internal drive heatsink is not as bulky, but includes a tiny fan connected to a large power cable. These fans can make a lot of noise because they need to spin so fast to move a lot of air, and the lack of a fan speed control will make the fan spin the same fast (and loud) whether you load the drive or not.
Other SSDs come with heatsinks, but they are mostly small passive heatsinks that don’t make any noise (many of them were built to fit the drives physically into the PlayStation 5, which also makes them invisible on most PCs). The vast majority Mid-range and high-end motherboards anyway have one or more built-in SSD heatsinks, often styled to match the rest of the motherboard. Installing any of these PCIe 5.0 SSDs will require removing that motherboard heatsink or using it at the risk of not cooling the SSD enough to prevent it from throttling.
Even aside from the cost of PCIe 5.0 SSDs and their stupid heatsinks, it’s hard to see the performance advantage of these drives right now. DirectStorage is a new Windows API that allows the GPU to load and unpack assets directly from your SSD, rather than using your CPU as an intermediary. Recent Testsusing DirectStorage-compliant Forspoken show that the difference between PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 drives is almost imperceptible to today’s drives, and past tests show that even PCIe 3.0 and SATA SSDs can greatly benefit from DirectStorage – it’s not a feature that state of the art storage is required and as of this writing this feature is not supported by many games.
PCIe 5.0 drives will drop in price over time, and better SSD controllers and NAND chips with more advanced manufacturing processes should also end up making them cooler. In the meantime, look at the price tags and designs of these early products, shake your head and move on.