Apacer, Zadak Announce World's First PCIe Gen 5 M.2 SSD: 13,000MB/sec reads and 12,000MB/sec writes (Updated)

[BiG StroOnZ]

Summary

APACER/Zadak has announced the world's first consumer-grade PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 SSD, which are capable of up to 13,000MB/sec (13GB/sec) reads and up to 12,000MB/sec (12GB/sec) writes. The new APACER and Zadak PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSDs are available in two versions: the standard APACER design, and then a ZADAK one (which looks virtually the same). Both of the new PCIe 5.0-ready SSDs support the latest NVMe 2.0 standard, with reads of up to 13GB/sec and writes of up to 12GB/sec on both drives.

 

 

 

 

 

Quotes

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 You'll need a PCIe 5.0-ready motherboard (Intel Z690 or AMD X670E/X670) to get the huge speeds of 13GB/sec+ but both the APACER + ZADAK PCIe 5.0 SSDs are backwards compatible, working on PCIe 4.0 at half the speed.

 

APACER AS2280F5 M.2 PCIe Gen5 x4 SSD

 

• Equipped with PCIe Gen5 x4 latest high-speed interface supports the latest NVMe 2.0 standard
• Read and write performance up to 13,000 / 12,000 MB/s
• Backwards compatible with PCIe Gen4, but doubles the performance
• Designed with exclusive high-quality metal cooling fins
• Built-in multiple protection technologies to ensure the correctness and stability of data reading and writing
• Comes with a 5-year global warranty

 

ZADAK TWSG5 M.2 PCIe Gen5 x4 SSD

 

• Adopts PCIe Gen5 latest high-speed interface supports the latest NVMe 2.0 standard
• Read and write performance up to 13,000 / 12,000 MB/s
• Comes with two types of heat sinks, ultra-thin graphene, and aluminum
• Comes with a 5-year global warranty

 

My thoughts

Boy do these drives fly! I know for most real world use cases this is all but useless, but still cool tech nonetheless. One of those things you don't need, but definitely want. I'm quite impressed with the performance of my Gen4 NVMe SSD, and these drives offer more than double the speed I'm getting with mine (crazy stuff). I'm guessing when more drives like these hit the market, Gen4 drives will drop in price; which will be good for new buyers. No word on pricing for these drives yet, but I imagine they aren't going to be cheap.

 

Sources

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/86395/apacer-is-first-with-pcie-5-0-ssds-up-to-13-000mb-sec-reads/index.html

https://www.techpowerup.com/295187/apacer-zadak-announce-worlds-first-pcie-gen-5-m-2-ssd

 

Update to this story:

 

Summary

Phison has presented the PS5026-E26 controller, by manufacturing a 1TB PCIe 5.0 TLC SSD. Phison's reference SSD reaches sequential read rates of over 12 GB/s in CrystalDiskMark and sequential write speeds of 10 GB/s. Phison's proof-of-concept SSD has a PCB and connector footprint incompatible with M.2 2280 slots. SSDs based on Phison's PS5026-E26 controller is slated to ship later this year, with AMD's 600-series chipsets for its AM5 platform.

 

 

 

Quotes

Quote

Phison has showcased the expected performance of its upcoming PS5026-E26 controller. The company showcased its new controller's prowess by building a reference SSD design based on 1 TB of Micron's TLC NAND. Phison's new controller has been built from the ground-up to accelerate next-generation SSD workloads - including direct access technologies based on Microsoft's DirectStorage API.

 

Phison's internal testing shows its reference SSD achieving sequential read speeds of over 12 GB/s in CrystalDiskMark, with sequential writes going as high as 10 GB/s - a 70% performance increase compared to the world's fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs, which currently top out at around 7 GB/s sequential speeds. As to 4K performance, one of the most tangible metrics for user experience, random reads are set at around 16.000 IOPS, showcasing room for improvement with further firmware optimizations for actual shipping products.

 

Phison opted for the M.2 2580 form-factor for its proof-of-concept SSD, which features a slightly wider PCB and connector footprint that's not backwards compatible with M.2 2280 slots. Expect SSDs based on Phison's PS5026-E26 controller to hit the market later this year - closer to AMD's release of its 600-series chipsets for its next-generation AM5 platform.

 

Sources

https://www.guru3d.com/news_story/phison_displays_12_gbs_transfer_rates_for_pcie_5_ssds_via_its_new_e26_controller.html 

https://www.techpowerup.com/295369/phison-showcases-12-gb-s-speeds-for-pcie-5-0-ssds-through-its-new-e26-controller 

[CephDigital]

Jeez that speed, but there's always the early adopter tax so I'm not expecting this to be cheap!

 

I do wonder though, how much speed will affect a direct storage implementation? Would we see a noticeable difference between a gen 3 vs gen 4 vs gen 5 drives?

[hishnash]

3 hours ago, CephDigital said:

Would we see a noticeable difference between a gen 3 vs gen 4 vs gen 5 drives?

I think that will depend a LOT on the game in question, how every its compression is and if future GPU hardware (or SoC hardware) includes separated dedicated de-compression pathways for the given compression protocol. If you look at the consoles they both have dedicated de-compression units within the SOC to provide streaming decompression of this data in such a way that does not put load on the gpu or cpu.  

The current generation of desktop gpus can do some decompression but its very limited, this is inherently going to be the case for gpus as they are quite suboptimal for highly branching code paths.  The compression schemes that can be de-compressed easily do not provide very good compression compared to those that are quick to decompress on dedicated hardware (if you have it otherwise they are very computationally difficult). The real win of de-compressing on the GPU (or local to the GPU VRAM) is the effective bandwidth is increase (if your compression ratio on avg reduces a texture by 50% then you in effect doubling the SSD bandwidth). 

The other aspect to consider it latency, one of the key aims of direct storage is to let the GPU reach out into the SSD and grab what it needs when it needs it without going through the CPU, Kernel, Gpu driver, User space driver, Game code, kernel, game code, user space driver, kernel driver, kernel ....  this is about random reads being executed faster such as loading textures as you pan your camera around so that the gpu does not need to keep all this data localy but can retrieve it just in time. Having high sequential read speeds when pulling large amounts of data from the SSD are not the same as having low random read latency.  

[Doobeedoo]

Very fast indeed. I want to see what Samsung will bring.

[porina]

I better bin my 980 Pro then  Wait, I don't have a PCIe 5.0 system.

 

Sounds ideal for the ultimate Direct Storage drive, if PCIe 6.0 isn't out before a game supports it.

[Shimejii]

2 hours ago, porina said:

I better bin my 980 Pro then  Wait, I don't have a PCIe 5.0 system.

 

Sounds ideal for the ultimate Direct Storage drive, if PCIe 6.0 isn't out before a game supports it.

PCIE 6.0? Thats rather unrealistic of you to have that expectation! To think it would come out on PC before windows 13 with games that actually Benefit from it, not just use it. 

 

Still dont see a point for these drives for most users. Still waiting for programs and such to properly catch up to NVME 3.0 and 4.0 speeds that benefit, let  alone 5.0. Now if you could have a Petabyte Storage server with all 5.0 NVME, i could start to see it, but thats still pretty hard. 

[Mihle]

Is there anyone that actually will have a use with this?

 

Wouldn't it be more useful to have two drives that run on 2 PCIe gen 5 lanes each instead?

[Senzelian]

I wonder which controller will run that thing and how well it manages temperature spikes.

Also TLC or QLC and how large is the cache? Pseudo SLC or do they actually run real SLC?

 

So many questions!

[RoboBravado]

I want to know the IOPS. Might be a more useful measure of performance at this point.

[BiG StroOnZ]

Was going to make a new thread for this, but decided not to because it's somewhat relevant to this thread (will update OP and add this info there):

 

Phison Showcases 12 GB/s Transfer Rates for PCIe 5.0 SSDs through its new E26 Controller

 

 

 

Quote

Phison has showcased the expected performance of its upcoming PS5026-E26 controller. The company showcased its new controller's prowess by building a reference SSD design based on 1 TB of Micron's TLC NAND. Phison's new controller has been built from the ground-up to accelerate next-generation SSD workloads - including direct access technologies based on Microsoft's DirectStorage API.

 

Phison's internal testing shows its reference SSD achieving sequential read speeds of over 12 GB/s in CrystalDiskMark, with sequential writes going as high as 10 GB/s - a 70% performance increase compared to the world's fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs, which currently top out at around 7 GB/s sequential speeds. As to 4K performance, one of the most tangible metrics for user experience, random reads are set at around 16.000 IOPS, showcasing room for improvement with further firmware optimizations for actual shipping products.

 

Phison opted for the M.2 2580 form-factor for its proof-of-concept SSD, which features a slightly wider PCB and connector footprint that's not backwards compatible with M.2 2280 slots. Expect SSDs based on Phison's PS5026-E26 controller to hit the market later this year - closer to AMD's release of its 600-series chipsets for its next-generation AM5 platform.

 

https://www.guru3d.com/news_story/phison_displays_12_gbs_transfer_rates_for_pcie_5_ssds_via_its_new_e26_controller.html

https://www.techpowerup.com/295369/phison-showcases-12-gb-s-speeds-for-pcie-5-0-ssds-through-its-new-e26-controller