Corsair's "Plan your next power move" page covers speedy DDR5 RAM, CPU coolers, high-performance PSUs, and some tempting numbers for next-gen storage. It has also outed the name of its first PCIe 5.0 SSD as the Corsair MP700 Gen5 PCIe x4 NVMe 2.0 M.2 SSD. That's quite the mouthful. Importantly, this new SSD promises to hit 10,000MB/s reads and 9,500MB/s writes.
That's speedy to be sure, although some way off the doubling of throughput that the new interface promises. For comparison, the MP600 Pro XT, which is a second-generation PCIe 4.0 drive built around Phison's E18 controller, manages 7,100MB/s reads and 6,800MB/s writes. Phison has already said that its new E26 controller is capable of hitting 13,500MB/s, so Corsair could be playing it safe or possibly isn't using that controller.
That's still plenty speedy in terms of straight throughput though, and besides sequential reads and writes are only part of the story. Random performance is important, and from the noises made by Phison and Sabrent recently, a drive's ability to handle sustained transfers for long periods of time is going to be vital to get the most out of DirectStorage.
Keeping the drive running cool while sustaining high transfers and also handling drive maintenance duties looks to be key here, and could explain that 10,000MB/s figure. Alternatively, we may see a similar situation as PCIe 4.0 which saw a notable uplift in performance going from first-generation and second-generation drives.
There's a good chance that we'll find out more details about this new PCIe 5.0 SSD, and others for that matter, with the release of AMD's Zen 4. AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs will support PCIe 5.0 storage devices directly and are expected to be announced later this month at AMD's livestream event on August 29.
Intel's Raptor Lake, which is the follow-up to Alder Lake, is expected to be released at roughly the same time and will also natively support PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs.
