PCIe Gen5 with 14GB/s read speed
ADATA, the company that owns the XPG gaming brand, has confirmed it will hold a press event on January 5th called Dawn of the New Xtreme. This event will be part of the CES 2022 expo.
At the event, ADATA is to showcase new products, such as DDR5 memory, gaming peripherals, and possibly next-gen laptops, which are clearly in focus for AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA presences at CES 2022.
Furthermore, ADATA is to unveil its new prototype PCIe Gen5.0 drives: Project Nighthawk and Project Blackbird. According to the official press release, this storage will rely on the PCIe Gen5 x4 interface and NVMe 2.0 protocol. They will be offered with up to 8TB of capacity.
In terms of speed, it is said that the fastest option will have up to 14 GB/s of sequential read bandwidth, but 12GB/s and 10GB/s options are also planned. The drives are compatible with the NVMe 2.0 standard which does not bring a lot of changes for client and consumer SSDs per se, but rather serves as a specs reorganization.
ADATA PCIe Gen5 Storage, Source: ADATA/ITHome
This is not the first time we get a tease of the next-gen storage options. Kioxia already confirmed it is developing storage up to 14GB/s. The new high-speed storage will therefore offer 103% faster read speed and 67% faster write speed (7 GB/s) over Gen4 standard. MSI has also confirmed it is developing M.2 Expander based on the new interface. This device was expected to be bundled with the MSI Z690 MEG GODLIKE motherboard, but sadly that wasn’t the case.
Currently, no desktop platform allows direct M.2 PCIe Gen5 compatibility. Only the primary PCIe Gen5 x16 slots on LGA1700-based Intel Z690 motherboards support this technology, which means ADATA PCIe Gen5 storage would require a compatible PCIe to M.2 adapter.
Source: ADATA