Apacer, Zadak Announce World's First PCIe Gen 5 M.2 SSD

[Raevenlord]

The first shot in the oncoming war of the PCIe Gen5 SSD war has been claimed by a duo of companies that likely wouldn't make anyone's first guess: Zadak and Apacer. Both companies entered a partnership towards developing and launching a PCIe Gen 5 SSD - despite platform support for us PC enthusiasts being available ever since Intel's launch of its Tiger Lake-based Gen 12 Core design and accompanying Z690 motherboards. Both Apacer and ZADAK have developed their own SKUs surrounding the SSD: AS2280F5 for Apacer, and the TWSG5 for ZADAK.

According to the companies, their respective SSDs can deliver up to 13,000 MB/s sequential read speeds and a scorching 12,000 MB/s sequential writes. Both SSDs are delivered in an M.2 Gen 5 form-factor, with support for the NVMe 2.0 protocol, and yet retain full backwards compatibility with PCIe Gen 4 designs. Both also feature an integrated heatsink design that betrays the SSD's joint development, as only the stickers change between both models - but ZADAK offers an "ultra thin graphene" heatsink option in addition to the heatsink-cooled model. No word on pricing or availability was available at time of writing.



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[Tomgang]

Hmm so no active cooler as rumors else suggest would be needed for pcie gen 5 nvme SSD's. Good news, no small noise fan. All throw i am happy enough with my Samsung 980 pro's, they fast enough for my use.

 

[Guwapo77]

With PCIE 6.0 specs near completion, rumor has it will be out next year. Any speculation as to when AMD and Intel plan using it on the consumer level? Possibly Zen 6? Can the X670 support a change like that or we'll be looking at X770. I'm starting to think this will be a "short" generation.

 

[AlwaysHope]

With PCIE 6.0 specs near completion, rumor has it will be out next year. Any speculation as to when AMD and Intel plan using it on the consumer level? Possibly Zen 6? Can the X670 support a change like that or we'll be looking at X770. I'm starting to think this will be a "short" generation.

A short generation alright, that's the plan to get enthusiasts upgrading as much as possible...
New toys always produce nice dopamine!

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Hmm so no active cooler as rumors else suggest would be needed for pcie gen 5 nvme SSD's. Good news, no small noise fan. All throw i am happy enough with my Samsung 980 pro's, they fast enough for my use.

Same. I have similar storage, 1 x 256 gen 3x4 boot, 2 x 1TB WD black SN850 and 2TB 2.5" SSD

I don't relly think anyone needs 12k MB/s speeds at the moment tbh.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

I think there's a typo in the article, it says "tigerlake and Z690" introduced PCIe 5.0, but I believe it's supposed to be alderlake

 

[MrMilli]

Same. I have similar storage, 1 x 256 gen 3x4 boot, 2 x 1TB WD black SN850 and 2TB 2.5" SSD

I don't relly think anyone needs 12k MB/s speeds at the moment tbh.

That is true for now, until Microsoft DirectStorage gets more widespread usage. Then it will be really useful to have those speeds.

 

[Tomgang]

Same. I have similar storage, 1 x 256 gen 3x4 boot, 2 x 1TB WD black SN850 and 2TB 2.5" SSD

I don't relly think anyone needs 12k MB/s speeds at the moment tbh.

Maybe a few need it, but not many I believe. Mostly people with large file to move I would say.

 

[mashie]

Maybe a few need it, but not many I believe. Mostly people with large file to move I would say.

Isn't that the speed of the PS5 around 9GB/s when using compresssion? This drive would offer that performance without the need of compression.

This drive isn't for the PS5 though so no idea if any games on PC even are designed to fully take advantage of this capability.

I'm prefectly happy with my two PCIe 3.0 NVMe's so not going to upgrade anytime soon.

 

[P4-630]

Wonder how hot it runs...
Waiting for reviews.

 

[Ruru]

Still waiting for PCIe 4.0 drives' price dropping to 3.0 levels.

 

[P4-630]

Still waiting for PCIe 4.0 drives' price dropping to 3.0 levels.

Got my 980 pro 1tb @ €149,-

 

[TheLostSwede]

With PCIE 6.0 specs near completion, rumor has it will be out next year. Any speculation as to when AMD and Intel plan using it on the consumer level? Possibly Zen 6? Can the X670 support a change like that or we'll be looking at X770. I'm starting to think this will be a "short" generation.

I wouldn't expect PCIe 6.0 to hit consumer products for at least 3-4 years, as it serves zero purpose in a consumer PC.

Still waiting for PCIe 4.0 drives' price dropping to 3.0 levels.

Still waiting for PCIe 3.0 drives to drop to SATA level pricing...

I mean, this argument can get very long and dry, since there's always someone that wants something cheaper.
You can in fact, already get PCIe 4.0 drives for the price of PCIe 3.0 drives, but they'll offer similar performance to PCIe 3.0 drives as well...

 

[Chrispy_]

12GB/s for about four seconds, then it overheats and runs out of SLC cache, right?

Windows still takes 8 seconds to boot, games load at the same speed as always, and applications load no faster. It's still telling that most people can't tell the difference between the best Gen4 NVMe drives at 7GB/s and an typical SATA SSD.

Perhaps once OSes and Applications are (re)designed from the ground up to expect fast storage, things will be different but right now storage is treated as slow and precious, which means compression and staging take more time to process than the data takes to move over a modern interface.

 

[bonehead123]

And so it begins....

Hopefully, these drives will hit the street soon, and then perhaps the prices of Gen 4 drives will start droppin even faster.

It may be true that most average pc users don't really need this kind of speed, but they surely want it, so I say: BRING IT !

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

And so it begins....

Hopefully, these drives will hit the street soon, and then perhaps the prices of Gen 4 drives will start droppin even faster.

It may be true that most average pc users don't really need this kind of speed, but they surely want it, so I say: BRING IT !

Right now there isnt much of use for Gen5 drives, atleast until the next Gen platform steps into the mainstream.

With entry level boards that are coming for AMD that may still be using Gen4 drives, adoption of Gen5 drives will be slow.

 

[Punkenjoy]

Isn't that the speed of the PS5 around 9GB/s when using compresssion? This drive would offer that performance without the need of compression.

This drive isn't for the PS5 though so no idea if any games on PC even are designed to fully take advantage of this capability.

I'm prefectly happy with my two PCIe 3.0 NVMe's so not going to upgrade anytime soon.

The thing is the data on PC is also compressed. So it's not really a bandwidth issue. The PS5 have a hardware decompression engine so it do not have to use CPU cores to do the job. Decompressing data at that rate can use all the core of a modern CPU easily so you can't really use that in game.

Direct Storage might help, but i wonder what is the hit on the GPU.

That is the benefits of the PS5, it can decompress without using any GPU or CPU.

I have a PCI-E 4.0 and 3.0 and i am happy too. I think i will have upgraded maybe 1-2 time before direct storage and game utilizing it massively will be around.

 

[kapone32]

These will sell, and I expect by the time X670 launches there will be more choices as well. The fact also is that there are plenty of Z690 users that will get whatever gets released between now and then too.

 

[auxy]

"Tiger Lake-based"?

 

[ARF]

No word on pricing or availability was available at time of writing.

I know the pricing. 499$ for 512 GB and 999$ for 1,000 GB. So, no, thanks, but no

 

[kapone32]

I know the pricing. 499$ for 512 GB and 999$ for 1,000 GB. So, no, thanks, but no

So you could buy 2 2TB 4.0 drives and run them in RAID 0, get the same performance and save $2-300.

 

[ARF]

12GB/s for about four seconds, then it overheats and runs out of SLC cache, right?

Windows still takes 8 seconds to boot, games load at the same speed as always, and applications load no faster. It's still telling that most people can't tell the difference between the best Gen4 NVMe drives at 7GB/s and an typical SATA SSD.

Perhaps once OSes and Applications are (re)designed from the ground up to expect fast storage, things will be different but right now storage is treated as slow and precious, which means compression and staging take more time to process than the data takes to move over a modern interface.

The fundamental problem that I see is that the OSes and Applications won't be touched until larger market share of fast drives begins to command it.
But, there are slow SATA HDDs, slow SATA SSDs, mid-level NVMe PCIe 3 x4 SSDs, high-end NVMe PCIe 4 x4 SSDs and finally now ultra-high-end NVMe PCIe 5 x4 SSDs.

Guess what. The first two types occupy around or over 90% of the market share. Or maybe over 95%?
So, no chance.

Unless the prices drop and everyone begins to buy NVMe.

 

[Chrispy_]

The fundamental problem that I see is that the OSes and Applications won't be touched until larger market share of fast drives begins to command it

The market is almost entirely SSD-based already. Very few machines still run mechanical OS/Application drives.

If you look at performance logs of OS/application/game startup you'll see that even a mediocre SSD (say a decade-old Samsung 830 drive capable of 400MB/s and 15-20K IOPS) rarely hits its sequential speeds or IOPS limits. The thing that takes the lion's share of the time is decompressing data, software timers waiting for acks or service responses, and just plain old stupid code. Yes, during W10 bootup for example, an NVMe drive will have a couple of 300ms bursts at >2GB/second but that's only responsible for a second or two of time saving over a much slower drive because the rest of the time, the storage is keeping up with the queue of data demands and feeding the application/CPU/RAM faster than the data can be processed.

We're used to thinking that a loading screen is "waiting on the disk" because 25 years ago, yes - 90% or more of the loading time was dominated by shitty disk IOPS and terrible transfer rates. Where an HDD used to have 90 seconds of grinding away and the CPU/RAM/software did their thing in 10 seconds, the SSDs now do the data part of that task in 800ms and the rest of the wait is still the CPU/RAM/software.

 

[ARF]

The market is almost entirely SSD-based already. Very few machines still run mechanical OS/Application drives.

If you look at performance logs of OS/application/game startup you'll see that even a mediocre SSD (say a decade-old Samsung 830 drive capable of 400MB/s and 15-20K IOPS) rarely hits its sequential speeds or IOPS limits. The thing that takes the lion's share of the time is decompressing data, software timers waiting for acks or service responses, and just plain old stupid code. Yes, during W10 bootup for example, an NVMe drive will have a couple of 300ms bursts at >2GB/second but that's only responsible for a second or two of time saving over a much slower drive because the rest of the time, the storage is keeping up with the queue of data demands and feeding the application/CPU/RAM faster than the data can be processed.

We're used to thinking that a loading screen is "waiting on the disk" because 25 years ago, yes - 90% or more of the loading time was dominated by shitty disk IOPS and terrible transfer rates. Where an HDD used to have 90 seconds of grinding away and the CPU/RAM/software did their thing in 10 seconds, the SSDs now do the data part of that task in 800ms and the rest of the wait is still the CPU/RAM/software.

Which Windows boots in 8 seconds?
Mine (Windows 10 latest version with all updates) boots in 35 seconds, starting from the Power button, through log in key entry and then the moment when I can start the MS Edge browser.
This is with an 8-thread Ryzen 2000 series APU and a 560 MB/s WD SSD...


So, the way you describe the problem is in the very slow CPU speeds then.

 

[Chrispy_]

Which Windows boots in 8 seconds?

Uh, all supported ones?
8, 8.1, 10, 11
If your PC takes 35 seconds to boot then you're probably running the CSM legacy mode for pre-UEFI hardware.
Have you tried UEFI boot on a clean install? It's not 2004 any more, dude!