Corsair is teasing performance metrics of its first PCIe 5.0 SSD, the Corsair MP700. The Corsair MP700 Gen 5 PCIe x4 NVMe 2.0 M.2 SSD features impressive 10,000 MB/s sequential read speeds and 9,500 MB/s sequential write speeds. The company touts the drive as ready for AM5, but that doesn't stop Intel Alder Lake (and upcoming Raptor Lake) users from benefitting as well.
The MP700 is 40% faster than Corsair's fastest PCIe Gen 4 drive, the MP600 Pro XT, in both sequential read and write speeds. This can be attributed to PCIe 5.0's higher bandwidth — in the M.2 form factor, PCIe 5.0 allows for a maximum of 15.8 GB/s.
The MP700 basically confirms we're likely to see PCIe 5.0 drives in consumers' hands this year — from not only Corsair, but other drive manufacturers as well. While Intel was ready for PCIe 5.0 last year with Alder Lake, manufacturers simply weren't ready to launch PCIe 5.0 drives when Alder Lake was released.
PCIe 5.0 SSDs were originally expected to hit only the enterprise market in 2022 — but, thanks to Silicon Motion's new enthusiast-grade SM2508 controller, PCIe 5.0 SSDs looked ready to make a "limited" appearance in the consumer enthusiast space. (And Corsair's teaser confirms this — the MP700 will likely be a higher-end "enthusiast" grade SSD.)
With the upcoming launch of AM5, as well as Intel's new Raptor Lake CPUs and 700 series chipset motherboards, it will be exciting to see PCIe 5.0 drives in the wild now that the technology is going mainstream.
At the moment this is just a teaser from Corsair — there's no release date or full specs shared on the site. But with the drive's advertised association with AMD's upcoming AM5 platform, we suspect it will launch around the same time as AM5 — in September, or by the end of the year.
