TEAMGROUP has announced one of the first commercial PCIe Gen5 SSDs in the tech industry. And as expected it offers enormous performance and large storage capacity.
Internal storage has long ceased to be the bottleneck that we suffered with hard drives. Solid state drives have managed to raise the performance bar for this important component to another level, especially since the arrival of solid state drives in PCI 3.0.
PCIe Gen5 SSD, another level
We already saw Intel demonstrate at CES the possibilities of these PCIe Gen5 SSDs and now the commercial products are starting to arrive. TEAMGROUP will offer the unit under the name ‘CARDEA’ and under its T-FORCE gaming component brand. It promises stratospheric sequential reads up to 13,000 MB per second and writings almost at their level: 12,000 MB per second. he says it will be “the fastest on the market”although we expect offer under this interface from all major manufacturers such as Kingston, Western Digital, Samsung and others.
The unit will connect to a M.2 port under PCIe 5.0an interface that already supports the Intel Alder Lake platform and that this year will also be compatible with the new AMD processors and motherboards under ZEN 4 architecture. Another novelty will be NVMe 2.0, a new version of another of the key protocols in SSD by making the drive bootable, it reduces I/O overhead and allows host hardware and software to fully exploit the levels of parallelism these drives are capable of.
The type of memory has not been provided, although we assume that it will be TLC or the latest QLC capable of storing four bits per cell and that manufacturers are already using almost massively, because it increases storage density and lowers costs, allowing models to be offered with greater capacity at lower prices. TEAMGROUP will market the series in versions with up to 4TB of storage capacity.
The unit will include a multi-layer aluminum heatsink. You already know that these M.2 modules are minimal in size, but they get quite hot and need at least passive heatsinks that are included in the same units or available on high-end motherboards. They will have a five year warranty.
PCIe Gen5 SSDs will be another level leap for storage. At least theoretical. We will see how that enormous speed (twice what PCIe 4.0 offers) translates into real tasks. TEAMGROUP says it will begin mass production of the unit in the third quarter, so it should be available before the end of the year.
