Not long ago we were talking about how it seemed that the PCIe 5.0 SSD was quite dead… when the interface was announced and the first compatible motherboards began to appear, several manufacturers launched their compatible SSDs but it seems that everything had remained anecdotal, because practically “it was never known again”: they were not seen in stores and nobody talked about them. However, now Silicon Power just announced his new SX80 Gen 5a fairly round SSD that can take back the baton of this market that seemed in danger.
When the first PCIe SSDs arrived we did notice a notable increase in performance in relation to SSDs with a SATA interface, but to be honest and although on paper the performance improvement was overwhelming, when the PCIe 4.0 SSDs came out we didn’t notice much either. difference with PCIe 3.0, at least in real life scenarios. For this reason, PCIe 5.0 SSDs were almost stillborn… or maybe not?
Silicon Power’s PCIe 5.0 SSD is more than round
And we don’t say this because of its shape. To begin with, the Silicon Power XS80 Gen5 is a PCIe 5.0 SSD as we have already mentioned, which offers fairly round theoretical performance rates: 10GB/s (10,000 MB/s) for both reading and writing. It has been manufactured using 232-layer NAND Flash memory chips, which has allowed the manufacturer to integrate high-density chips so that even in the 2 TB capacity model they have only needed to place the chips on one of the sides of the PCB, thus So with a passive heatsink you no longer need anything else to keep the unit’s heat at bay.
Certainly the heatsink is quite large, but at least it is passive and we will not be introducing a new element that will cause noise in the PC. To tell the truth, it is quite an achievement considering that PCIe 5.0 SSDs tend to get hot enough to require active cooling solutions, so… point for the manufacturer! In any case, it will be necessary to see in a real scenario whether it suffers from Thermal Throttling or not, but if the manufacturer launches it on the market, it will be because they have already verified it; It certainly looks good.
We have already mentioned that this SSD offers 10 GB/s of both reading and writing speeds and we have mentioned that there will be a 2 TB capacity drive, but that will be the top of the range because it will also be offered with 1 TB capacity, using the same controller (they haven’t said what it is but being manufacturers it’s probably their own) and the same heatsink. The SSD with the heatsink included weighs 53 grams (so the heatsink alone must already weigh about 45 grams, taking into account that M.2 SSDs usually weigh 8-9 grams) and has dimensions of 24 x 80.4 x 20.5 mm.
Both models will have a 5-year manufacturer’s warranty and should arrive in stores around the world in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, the manufacturer has said that it will be an affordable SSD but has not confirmed the price (when it does, we will update this article), but it certainly looks pretty good and, if the price is right, it could serve to revive this market of PCIe 5.0 SSD that seems to be in low hours.
