Silicon Motion's PCIe 5.0 controller will appear on many drives.
Most companies have yet to transition all of their NVMe SSD lines to PCI Express 4.0, but PCIe 5.0 SSDs for PCs are on the horizon.
Storage company Silicon Motion said on a recent conference call that it expects its PCIe 5.0-enabled SSD controllers for consumer SSDs to be available sometime in 2024, opening the door to a variety of high-performance drives from different manufacturers. SSD maker ADATA teased (though with no scheduled release date) a couple of PCIe 5.0 SSDs at CES last month that boast read speeds of up to 14 GB/s and write speeds of up to 12 GB/s with a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller . Today's high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs like Samsung's 980 Pro achieve around half of these speeds.
Other reports suggest these PCIe 5.0 consumer SSDs will arrive later in 2022, but according to the call log, that only applies to the latest version of Silicon Motion's PCIe 5.0 controller for enterprise SSDs -- the products used in servers and data land centers. , not what normally ends up on the PC on your desk or lap. The first PCIe 4.0 SSDs for consumer PCs were also demonstrated a few years before CES before they became commercial products.
For 2022 and 2023, Silicon Motion will continue to focus on these PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Budget SSDs like Western Digital's WD Black SN770 SE are just beginning their transition to PCIe 4.0, and according to reviews like this one from Tom's Hardware, their controllers and flash storage are still not fast enough to benefit much from the bandwidth . Silicon Motion also says that PCIe 4.0 SSDs have only become common in pre-built PCs in the last year due to "thorough verification and testing" requirements.
If you're looking to future-proof your PC with PCIe 5.0 SSDs when they arrive, Intel's 12th Gen "Alder Lake" processors and AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7000-series Zen 4 CPUs will support PCIe 5.0.
