Skip to main content

Blazing-fast PCIe 5 SSDs with 13,000MBps are almost here

It seems that, at long last, we might finally see PCIe 5 SSDs on the market soon enough. Apacer and Zadak have just announced the first consumer PCIe Gen 5 SSDs to be released later this year.

The new drives will undoubtedly rank highly among the best SSDs, seeing as they offer a massive step up in both read and write speeds, reaching 13,000MBps and 12,000MBs respectively.

Apacer SSD over a colorful background.
Apacer

PCIe Gen 5 has been around for a while, but up until now, there have been no consumer SSDs released that utilize the new technology. Even though the Intel Alder Lake platform supports PCIe 5 (as well as DDR5 memory), for all these months following its release, customers have been unable to buy a Gen 5 SSD — simply because they just didn’t exist on the market.

Recommended Videos

Things seem to be about to change for the better. Apacer and Zadak have two SSDs coming up, one a standard Apacer design, and one Zadak. Both of the drives share a lot of similarities, most importantly, blazing-fast read and write speeds, providing a huge improvement over the PCIe Gen 4 drives that are available today. In fact, PCIe 5.0 offers double the bandwidth of the previous generation.

The Apacer AS2280F5 M.2 PCIe Gen5 x4 SSD comes with read and write performance of up to 13,000/12,000MBps. It remains backward compatible with PCIe Gen 4, but of course, the performance will be lowered if you use this drive on the older platform. The SSD comes with an aluminum heatsink and metal cooling fins. Apacer teased that the drive also offers multiple safety measures that protect the stability of data reading and writing, but it hasn’t disclosed what exactly we can expect here.

Zadak PCIe Gen 5 SSD.
Zadak/Wccftech

Zadak’s TWSG5 Gen5 x4 SSD offers the same read and write performance as the Apacer model. Cooling has also been a priority here, with two types of heat sinks: Ultra-thin graphene and aluminum. Both the SSDs come with support for the latest NVMe 2.0 standard and a 5-year global warranty.

The upcoming release was first spotted by Wccftech. Unfortunately, the official pricing and release dates for the new SSDs are both yet to be announced. However, assuming that they will cost more than the PCIe Gen 4 SSDs currently available is a safe bet — after all, the performance gap is going to be large.

AMD will soon release its next-gen processors, dubbed Ryzen 7000, and will catch up to Intel in terms of PCIe 5 support. With not just one, but two CPU lines that offer access to PCIe 5, storage manufacturers will hopefully soon release more of these highly impressive speed fiends. Stay tuned.

Monica J. White
Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
PCIe 5 vs. PCIe 4: Twice the bandwidth is coming
Computer motherboard stock photo

 

The PCI Express standard, or PCIe, has been a staple for connecting PC peripherals and components to a desktop. If you buy new PC parts in 2021, they'll likely support the current fourth generation. But with Intel's upcoming launch of its Alder Lake processors later this year, we'll already be moving to the fifth generation of the PCI Express interface known as PCIe 5, which should offer significantly faster data transfers.

Read more
Outlook typing lag will finally get a fix from Microsoft
A Dell laptop connected to a hard drive on a couch.

If you use classic Outlook to handle your emails, then you're most likely familiar with the annoying bug that causes huge CPU spikes while typing. It can be difficult to finish emails when your system resources jump by as much as 50 percent (and increase power usage with it), but Microsoft has finally announced that a fix is on the way. The downside? It won't arrive until late May for most users, although some might see it in early or mid May if they're part of the beta program. Until then, there is a workaround.

Rolling classic Outlook back to version 2405 seems to fix the issue, but it comes with a not-insignificant tradeoff. Updates since version 2405 have patched several security flaws, so if you opt to go this route, be aware that it opens your system to vulnerabilities.

Read more
YouTube’s AI Overviews want to make search results smarter
YouTube App

YouTube is experimenting with a new AI feature that could change how people find videos. Here's the kicker: not everyone is going to love it.

The platform has started rolling out AI-generated video summaries directly in search results, but only for a limited group of YouTube Premium subscribers in the U.S. For now, the AI Overviews are focused on things like product recommendations and travel ideas. They're meant to give quick highlights from multiple videos without making users look at each item they're interested in.

Read more