The release of the first PCIe Gen5 SSDs came in a fairly limited fashion, with their debut taking place in Japan about a week ago. The CFD Gaming firm was one of the first to bet on these new storage solutions, and to keep working temperatures under control, it set up a huge refrigeration system that was made up of a radiator and a fan located just above.
Unlike what happens with PCIe Gen4 SSDs, where we only have a modest passive cooling system that is more than enough to avoid excessive heat problems, in PCIe Gen5 SSDs the size of the radiator has been increased greatly, and the use of an active element, the fanimplies that we have to connect one more cable, and that we also have another source of noise.
The fan that mounts the CFD Gaming PCIe Gen5 SSDs is very noisy, so much so that when it works at full load it gives us the feeling that it is going to fly away at any moment. The attached video speaks for itself, and I think it’s a noise level that would be annoying to any type of user, even those with a higher tolerance level. Apparently the fan works at 21,000 rotations per minute.
ｷﾞｭ-ﾝ⬇️ｷﾞｭ-ﾝ⬆️ｷﾞｭ-ﾝ⬇️ｷﾞｭ-ﾝ⬆️ pic.twitter.com/JhCaRBJcDy
— 188号 (@momomo_us) February 5, 2023
I know those fan work spikes do not occur consistentlyonly when the drive is under heavy workload, which obviously won’t happen all the time and won’t last for long periods of time either, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying, that much goes without saying.
I understand that as these are new generation storage units that are capable of offering a high level of performance, they produce more heat, and in the end you have to integrate a more powerful cooling system to dissipate it, but frankly I think that there has to be a better way to cool these PCIe Gen5 SSDsand I hope that other first-rate manufacturers surprise us with quieter and better raised bets.
Performance-wise, these early PCIe Gen5 SSDs are capable of overcome the barrier of 10 GB / s in reading and writing sequencel, values that are clearly above the 7.5 GB/s that PCIe Gen4 SSDs can achieve. However, I think the difference in performance between the two is clouded by that huge and noisy cooling system, and also by their higher asking price.
Think that the 2 TB unit that stars in this news has an approximate price of 350 euro, after converting currency and applying VAT, and that it is possible to find 2TB PCIe Gen4 7GB/s drives for less than 250 euro.
