World’s First PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD Announced by Gigabyte

Perfect for 3rd Gen Ryzen Platform

Rumours have been circulating for a while that AMD‘s 3rd Gen Ryzen platform will have PCIe 4.0 as the standard. This has been somewhat verified recently with the leak of an X570 chipset layout diagram. Now to make that news even sweeter, the first PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD has been announced…by Gigabyte.

Although a notable name with motherboard and video cards, Gigabyte is not exactly the first brand you think of when it comes to storage. In fact, they have been somewhat conservative when it comes to their storage market expansions. Only releasing their first SATA SSD last year. Which is why this announcement is quite surprising.

How Much Faster is PCIe 4.0 to PCIe 3.0?

PCIe 4.0 effectively doubles the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0. It is 16GT/s versus 8GT/s, a much more significant leap from PCIe 2.0 (5GT/s) to PCIe 3.0. PCIe 2.0 itself has twice the bandwidth of the original PCIe 1.0 (2.5GT/s).

In raw numbers, that means PCIe 4.0 x16 could deliver as much as 31.5GB/s of bandwidth, versus 15.75GB/s for PCIe 3.0 x16.

Just how fast are these Gigabyte M.2 SSDs? According to their statement, it can reach 5000MB/s read/write speeds in “low temperatures”.

The fastest SATA SSDs in comparison typically reach 550MB/s read and 540MB/s write speeds. Even Samsung’s fastest consumer M.2 NVMe SSD the 970 Pro with its 3500MB/s read and 2700MB/s write speeds pale in comparison*.

Gigabyte did not divulge other information other than the 5000MB/s speed for now. They did not even show the photo of the product yet (the photo above is their previous M.2 NVMe drive with a Phison controller). Although we can expect to see it at Computex 2019 next week.

CORRECTION: Samsung’s current fastest M.2 NVMe drive is actually the 970 EVO Plus with a 3300MB/s write speed.