"old motherboards"? So far, the only motherboards with PCIe 5.0 storage will be X670E/X670/B650.... I don't think it'd be too common for someone to buy a 5.0 drive in order to run it on an old mobo
Like I run my 980 PRO on a PCIE 3.0 board you mean?
I gain two advantages.
Its chip wont get as hot as its spec'd to higher performance, so at same performance as 970 EVO its cooler.
I get the higher performance that still fits within 3.0 bandwidth such as the higher sustained writes and random i/o.
So M.2 is already showing its flaws if they having to increase the width. The problem when you design something to be tiny and with no headroom for scaling up the products in future. Sales of 5.0 SSD's will get crippled if this is the case as only 5.0 board/laptop owners could use them natively on boards.
Is there even a need in the consumer space for 5.0 NVME? They already really fast with limited noticeable use cases even over SATA spec.
What would you suggest instead?
U.2 never took off and this is much cheaper, both in terms of connectors and the drives themselves.
Also no need for any cables to connect with.
Technically we need a new PC form factor, where the M.2 drives get a dedicated place on the motherboard, but that's unlikely to happen.
U.2 is doing fine in the server space.
The solution is easy, but I dont think the industry likes it for whatever reason.
Either.
PCIE SSD's (gigabyte did one early on I think, so this seemed to be the original idea).
U.2
Increased width but with b/c built in in so the additional part has gaps so can still fit in a smaller width slot. I dont like this, as noticing a trend now on new boards where everything is been compromised to cram in more M.2 slots as if they think everyone wants 4+ M.2 drives. There is already a thread on here questioning why all upcoming AMD board designs only have 2/3 PCIE slots.
PCIE storage adaptors with M.2 slots on them. With burification as well this is the logical way forward combine it with my b/c width idea on the slots if they 5.0 slots. Each higher end board could come with one card included to work in second 8x/16x slot, and boards start only coming with 1 or 2 onboard M.2 slots again. This would also make lower end boards cheaper.
Consider not selling 5.0 SSDs on consumer market and as such dont compromise consumer boards for them, the need seems to be mostly epeen hype related. This would also improve the above idea so e.g. a 8 lane PCIE 5.0 slot could host either 4 PCIE 4.0 SSDs or 8 3.0 SSDs.
A suggestion would be too strong a word for my non-expert thoughts, but as to what I would have preferred seeing for desktops in an alternate universe, if not going with the 2.5” form factor for drives, then simply PCIe cards like any normal expansion. I’d presume this is ultimately the route to take anyway for some situations e.g. want a multiplicity of drives without having to settle with SATA.
This is so obvious its like staring me right in the face, yet the industry doesnt seem to want it. PCIE is i/o expansion which is what NVME is, but the consumer industry is almost treating it now as just a GPU interface.
