What Is PCI Express 5.0, and Why Does It Matter for the Newest SSDs?
Choosing a solid-state drive (SSD) to serve as the boot drive in your new desktop PC has always been one of the highest-impact ways to ensure your computer will run as fast as possible. A fast SSD makes an especially large impact in a gaming PC, which needs to store and access hundreds of gigabytes of game data quickly. Choosing a fast SSD is especially important when you’re building a new gaming PC from scratch or buying a custom one from a vendor, since in either case you might have the option of employing the new PCI Express (PCIe) 5.0 bus as the data conduit for the boot drive.PCIe 4.0 SSDs anchor most of today's fastest desktops, and they are very fast—but PCIe 5.0 drives are the future, and they have just started to arrive. With theoretical bandwidth speeds up to 14,000MBps, some PCIe 5.0 drives could be nearly twice as fast as PCIe 4.0 SSDs at peak data transfers, though it's still early days and we haven't seen many for sale quite yet. While it’s true that a 7,000MBps-rated PCIe 4.0 drive is almost certainly fast enough even for an up-to-the-moment, cost-no-object gaming PC, the vast speed increase possible with PCIe 5.0 is worth a look, if you want to future-proof your investment in a multi-kilobuck PC. (Incidentally, sorry, laptop users: PCIe 5.0 SSDs don't yet have a clear path onto notebooks, due to thermal-management and cost issues.)
As with any bleeding-edge technology, PCIe 5.0 introduces several caveats you'll need to consider. Let’s take a look at the features and limitations of PCIe 5.0, and what they mean for SSDs in greater detail.
PCIe (for Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) 5.0 is the latest PCIe standard, offering substantial increases in bandwidth over previous generations. Using a
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