Sunday, August 14th 2022
Samsung 990 PRO PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSD Confirmed By PCI-SIG
The upcoming Samsung 990 PRO flagship consumer SSD has recently been listed as PCIe 5.0 compliant by PCI-SIG with the entry also confirming the drive's name and M.2 interface. The upgrade to PCIe 5.0 from 4.0 doubles the available bandwidth for the card with Samsung's existing enterprise PCIe 5.0 drives reaching speeds of 13,000 MB/s significantly above the 7000 MB/s of the best PCIe 4.0 drives. The latest Intel Alder Lake systems can support PCIe 5.0 drives on select motherboards with AMD support set to arrive with the launch of Ryzen 7000 and X670/B650 motherboards. Samsung is expected to release at least 1 TB and 2 TB variants of the drive however other details such as the exact length of the card and the controller used are currently unknown.
Sources:
PCI-SIG (via @KOMACHI_ENSAKA), VideoCardz
16 Comments on Samsung 990 PRO PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSD Confirmed By PCI-SIG
8TB should be doable with 230+ layers that other NAND makers have revealed recently. So i assume Samsung also has one in the works but have yet to announce it. The problem is that those high layer count packages will not enter mass production until the end of this year or beginning 2023 most likely.
With existing controllers?
Sadly i dont think we're gunna see size increases for a year or two, outside of QLC drives
And if Samsung will not produce 4TB and 8TB Gen5 options then im sure Phison and/or Silicon Motion will.
However, the new controllers will hopefully improve the IOPS and RND performance, together with more advanced NAND flash, which would be far more interesting at this point. Of course it will be TLC, no-one makes dense or fast enough MLC for a product like this. 3D stacked TLC is the future for NAND, for now.
Will Gen5 devices 'max out' a Gen4 bus, or will we see some kind of overhead?
Controllers only have so many channels - 8 16 and 32
So 32 channels by the current 512Gb (64GB) modules = ... 2TB.
You can't get bigger without new NAND tech coming out.
Also current M.2 drives use much bigger chips than 64GB. More like 512GB-1TB.