It's been a frustrating 18 months since launch but we'll finally be getting PCIe 5 SSDs worth a damn this year

Good news everyone, the only PCIe 5.0 SSD controller that currently makes any damned sense is starting to ship out to drive manufacturers. Fingers crossed that means we ought to see some Gen5 drives worth a damn before the end of the year.

The SiliconMotion SM2508 memory controller (pdf warning) has been delayed a couple of times, reportedly in order to switch to a more advanced 6nm process at TSMC. We initially expected it to come around earlier this year, but now it is finally being sent out to manufacturers for them to create their own SSDs built around this new controller.

But what is it about this new wee bit of silicon that might make PCIe 5 SSDs relevant? In short, it's the mix of straight-line storage performance and efficiency. Half of that equation has already been dealt with by the Phison E26 controller—the one used for pretty much all Gen5 SSDs on the market today—but oh boy, does it run hot. And not just a little bit hot.

This is the reason PCIe 5 drives have variously come with active cooling, or else an admission that you're going to need to provide some serious chip-chilling yourself if you're hoping to get the most out of the shiny new, and expensive SSD. It's also the reason that we actively do not recommend PCIe 5 SSDs.

Sure, they have great sequential read and write speeds, with 12,000 — 14,000 MB/s not being beyond the realms of possibility. But what does that actually mean? Not a huge amount when you only have one Gen5 slot in your board, meaning you'll only see those transfer speeds moving big files around your one SSD. Transferring in and out of that drive will always be limited by either the slowest drive or the slowest interface.

And the random 4k read/write speeds have barely moved on from the PCIe 4 SSDs that have become ubiquitous. That means you're not going to suddenly notice you're getting a more zippy Windows experience as your Gen5 boot drive isn't dealing with the myriad of tiny read/write operations that make up its day-to-day OS