PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the Way: 14.6GB/s Speed

The new SSD standard offers almost twice the bandwidth of Gen 4 NVMe drives.

As mainstream computers begin adopting PCIe Gen 5 support, FADU Technology has announced its first PCIe Gen 5 SSD and controller designs. According to GlobeNewswire, these SSDs will target high-end performances of 14.6GB/s, consume less power and are designed specifically for the cloud and data center markets.

FADU's preliminary prototypes for Gen 5 SSDs offer sequential write speeds of up to 10.4GB/s and sequential read speeds of up to 14.6GB/s, with a power consumption of less than 5.2W at this stage. In addition, rates of up to 3.5 million random reads (IOPS) and 734,000 random writes (IOPS) are given.

The new SSDs will run on a PCIe Gen 5 interface with four link lanes and feature the NVMe 1.4+ protocol along with OCP Cloud Spec 2.0. Although there is no development regarding the drives that will reach consumers yet, we know that the 5th generation SSDs are currently in production. The first PCI Express 5.0 SSDs are expected to arrive in 2022, and it is possible that we will see products that will reach the consumer later.

As you know, Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs and Z690 motherboards were the first consumer products to support PCIe 5.0 SSDs. We can say that PCIe 5.0 support does not have much functionality, since there are no drivers on the market where we can use these technologies at the moment. On the other hand, we expect upcoming graphics cards to come with PCIe 5.0 connection. Finally, it has been reported that the mentioned SSDs will be released in late 2022.

FADU Echo SSD Front Features
Form Factor: E1.S / E1.L / E3 / U.2
SSD Controller: FADU FC5161
Interface: PCIe 5.0 x 4 / NVMe 1.4+ / OCP Cloud Spec 2.0
NAND Interface: 16 Channel / ONFi 5 (2400MT/s)
Sequential Read: 14.6 GB/s
Sequential Write: 10.4 GB/s
Random Read: 3400K IOPs
Random Write: 735K IOPs
Average Power: <5.2 W