Kioxia recently held a presentation at the China Flash Market Summit (CFMS) where the company teased a next-generation PCIe 5.0 SSD that will blow even the best SSDs out of the water, according to a Weixin user. The prototype will likely hail from one of Kioxia's data center product lines, however, it's not far-fetched to think that consumer PCIe 5.0 SSDs will offer a similar level of performance.
PCIe 5.0 is a much-awaited upgrade to the PCIe standard as it'll offer twice as much throughput over the current PCIe 4.0 interface. While PCIe 4.0 delivers a data rate up to 16 Gbps per link, PCIe 5.0 doubles that number to 32 Gbps. The additional throughput will open up a new world of performance for PCIe-based devices, especially SSDs.
Kioxia's PCIe 5.0 SSD will land with sequential read and write speeds up to 14,000 MBps and 7,000 MBps, respectively. For comparison, the brand's current CM6 PCIe 4.0 drive puts out 6,900 MBps reads and 4,200 MBps writes. The PCIe 5.0 upgrade reveals a whopping 103% uplift in sequential read speeds and 67% for writes.
Part of the chart isn't visible, but the PCIe 5.0 SSD shows random performance increases between 50% and 79%. The response time has also greatly improved. Kioxia estimates up to 77% reduction in read latency and 50% lower write latency.
Since the PCIe 5.0 drive is aimed at data centers, it will arrive in both EDSFF E3 and 2.5-inch U.2 form factors. Kioxia plans to integrate an eight-channel controller for the data center drives and up to a 16-channel controller for the more demanding enterprise models. Obviously, capacity and endurance won't be an issue. The company plans to offer the PCIe 5.0 SSDs from 1.6TB to 30TB with endurance ratings spanning from 1 to 3 DWPD (drive writes per day).
Kioxia will release the PCIe 5.0 SSD in the fourth quarter of this year. The brand expects server manufacturers to take between five to six months to validate and certify the drives for their products. As with any type of cutting-edge technology, market acceptance will be progressive.
