Micron, they of Crucial SSD fame, have announced a new PCIe Gen 6 SSD capable of 26 GB/s. That’s right ladies and germs, your feeble, antiquated 14GB/s Gen 5 drive is yesterday’s news (even if PCIe 5.0 is as good as it gets among the best gaming SSDs today). Anybody who’s anyone will soon have a Gen 6 SSD.
Well, ish. The Micron drive isn’t exactly something you’re going to be able to buy next week and slap into your PC or laptop. Apart from anything else, your PC or laptop doesn’t even support PCIe Gen 6 and won’t do for a while yet.
More to the point, this new PCIe 6.0 drive is for high-end servers and AI infrastructure. Micron hasn’t revealed much by way of details of the new drive (via Techspot). The announcement is more of an early peak for the Future Memory and Storage conference currently ongoing in Santa Clara, California.
Really, all that Micron has said is that the drive will have sequential read performance in excess of 26 GB/s. Existing PCIe Gen 5 drives, such as the Teamgroup Z540, top out at about 14 GB/s in theory, usually less in practice. So, Micron’s new baby is getting on for nearly twice as fast in terms of peak bandwidth.
Presumably it will require some kind of specialised megabucks adapter card for servers and AI racks and the whole thing will cost more than your house. Moreover, the value of upping the raw bandwidth is questionable in any case when it comes to real-world PC performance. Even antediluvian PCIe Gen 4 drives are good for upwards of 6 GB/s, which on paper would be enough to load pretty much any game in a couple of seconds.
But of course, that’s not quite how it works. Other aspects of performance, like latency and random access are just as important if not more so. Indeed, if you asked us what we’d most like to see from a next-gen SSD, a doubling of raw throughput or a doubling of IOPS performance, it would definitely be the latter.
The first generation of PCIe Gen 5 drives have been somewhat problematic, too, thanks to the Phison E26 controller which has required active cooling to deliver peak performance.
So, we’re currently quite keen to see how drives based on the new SiliconMotion SM2508 controller pan out. The SiliconMotion chip is said to be less power hungry and run cooler than the Phison controller, but still capable of 14.5GB/s reads and 14GB/s writes.
As it happens, it’s also claimed to deliver pretty much double the IOPS performance of its predecessor. So, we’re hoping to see full-spec Gen 5 drives with the new chip that can run with passive cooling. Phison also has its own E31T controller, which is said to be its first mainstream controller, but it might be sacrificing raw speed for thermals.
Seguing back to the Gen 6 drive, it probably won’t be actually available to buy until next year and PCs that support Gen 6 storage tech are even further out, probably not until at least 2026 and probably more like 2027 or 2028.
That’s probably fine given that hardly anyone has a Gen 5 drive today and frankly Gen 5 drives have yet to really deliver on the promise of that iteration of the PCI Express interface.