From Gigabyte’s Japanese AORUS Twitter, you can see a teaser of a mysterious PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD which is “coming soon”. It is the industry’s first SSDs featuring a PCIe 4.0 interface, to launch at Computex. In this post, we will walk you through something about PCIe 4.0, as well as this Gigabyte SSD.

High PCIe Performance

As the fourth generation of the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) motherboard interface, PCIe 4.0 will double the bandwidth available to hard drives, graphics cards, Wi-Fi, Ethernet cards and SSDs.

PCIe slots can be configured with one lane or multiple of four lanes, for example, x1, x4, x8, x16, x32, x64, etc. Compared to the previous one, each new generation doubles the bandwidth.

And the PCIe 4.0 can offer 16GT/s bit rate. That is, every single lane supports roughly 2GB/s bit rate. Let’s see a table to learn the high performance of this new PCIe standard:

PCIe 4 high performance

Gigabyte PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD: 5GB/s

With the PCIe 4.0 interface, the speed of Gigabyte’s SSD has a prominent improvement. How fast is the Gigabyte PCIe 4.0 SSD? According to this company’s statement, it can reach 5GB/s read/write speeds in low temperatures.

In comparison, the fastest SATA SSDs typically reach 550MB/s read and 540MB/s write speeds. Even the fastest Samsung’s consumer 970 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD provides 3500MB/s read and 2700MB/s write speeds.

Until now, Gigabyte hasn’t revealed other information except the 5GB/s speed. For the 4K random performance, we can expect the random performance to land in the 900,000 IOPS for both reads and writes considering what we know about the SSD controller. Besides, it is also possible that this PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD is available in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB of capacities.

This means Gigabyte PCIe 4.0 SSD will be the fastest M.2 SSD in the market all over the world.

Use Phison Controller

According to the picture in Gigabyte’s tweet, it is not too hard to deduce the components underneath. Gigabyte doesn’t make its own SSD controller, so it may have three possible choices from third-party controller companies: SMI, Phison or Link-A-Media.

Gigabyte is a rather new participant on the SSD market and it currently only offers drives based on controllers from Phison. Therefore, it is more likely that this company will demonstrate a PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD based on the PS5016-E16 controller that was shown previously at CES2019 this year although Gigabyte hasn’t officially confirmed the use of Phison controller.

The PS5016-E16 processor has 8 NAND channels with 32CE targets, supports up to 800MT/s interface speeds. And the controller features the 4th Gen LDPC ECC engine and supports both 3D TLC and QLC NAND flash memory. Besides, it also supports a DDR-41600 DRAM buffer to ensure high performance.

In January, a prototype SSD powered by the PS5016-E16 could only offer 4GB of read speed and 4.2GB/s of write speed. Given the 5GB/s specification of Gigabyte PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, it is obvious that Phison has dramatically improved the performance of SSDs based on its controller in less than half of a year.

Phison Shows the First PCIe 4.0 SSD Demo with Fast Speed
Phison Shows the First PCIe 4.0 SSD Demo with Fast Speed

Phison has shown the first PCIe Gen 4x4 NVMe SSD controller and this Phison E16 SSD controller has a big feature – fast speed.

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Final Words

The Computex 2019 will take place from May 28 to June 1, 2019, in Taipei, Taiwan. If you want to learn more information about this Gigabyte PCIe 4.0 SSD including pricing, capacities, and availability, please pay attention to this trade show.

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