You Don't Need a PCIe 5.0 SSD: Here's Why
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PCIe 5.0 solid-state drives (SSDs) have entered the market in the middle of the largest slump in flash memory prices we've ever seen. While being on the cutting edge sounds exciting, you might want to skip PCIe 5.0 SSDs and stick to PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 SSDs for now. Here's why.
Early PCIe 5.0 SSDs Are Overpriced
If you're in the market for a new PCIe SSD or maybe even a new RAM kit, you're in luck because we're in the middle of the largest price drop the flash memory market has ever seen. Right now, you can get a quality PCIe 4.0 SSDs with 1TB capacity for less than $100, with 2TB models selling for less than $200.
And then you have the latest and greatest in solid-state storage technology in the form of PCIe 5.0 SSDs that are just ridiculously overpriced for what they offer. For instance, a quick Newegg search shows that the flagship PCIe 4.0 SSD from Western Digital and one the best SSDs for the PS5, the SN850X, costs $90 for the 1TB model and $160 for the 2TB unit.
Moving on to our favorite SSD for gaming, the Samsung 980 Pro, we can find it on Amazon for $80 and $139 for 1TB and 2TB versions, respectively. Another drive featured on the list, the Crucial P5 Plus, can be yours for $80 or $127, depending on whether you want it in 1TB or 2TB capacity.
On the other hand, the Corsair MP700, Corsair's flagship PCIe 5.0 SSD, will set you back at least $170, which is the cost of the 1TB version. The MSI M570 HS, MSI's flagship PCIe 5.0 SSD, commands an even more ridiculous price, with MSI asking $350 for the 2TB version.
Now, if PCIe 5.0 SSDs offered double the performance over your typical PCIe 4.0 drive, we would be okay with these prices. But in reality, while PCIe 5.0 SSDs offer a solid improvement when it comes to sequential read and write speeds, their real-world performance improvements embodied in random read and write capability are marginal at best.
Forget About Sequential Performance, Random IOPS Is What Matters
The current fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD, the Crucial T700, can hit upwards of 12GBps in sequential write. That's impressive at the first glance considering that the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs top out at about 7GBps-7.5GBps. But the truth is that you most likely won't see this level of performance if you decide to snag the T700 or any other PCIe 5.0 drive.
It's because when copy or move a file between two storage devices the maximum transfer speed is always limited by the slower drive. In other words, if you take a huge file and copy or move it between two storage drives, you'll need two T700s to see those 12GBps transfer speed.
And most of us don't have a motherboard that supports even a single PCIe 5.0 SSD, let alone multiple PCIe 5.0 drives. The only chipsets with support for PCIe 5.0 SSDs are Intel's Z790 and B760 and AMD's B650/B650E, and X670/X670E. In other words, don't expect a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot on your board unless you're rocking a current-gen CPU from Intel or AMD---an Intel 13th Gen CPU or an AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU.
Having a single PCIe 5.0 SSD as the boot drive could still be the answer. I mean, no one needs 10GBps and higher sequential speeds unless their job is to copy huge files from one storage drive to another. On the other hand, a single PCIe 5.0 drive should be everything you need; while you won't be able to experience those blazing fast sequential transfer speeds, at least you'll profit from faster boot times, better performance in apps that use scratch disks such as Adobe Photoshop, faster loading times in games installed on the PCIe 5.0 drive, faster installation times, etc., right? Well, not really.
You see, while the sequential performance of PCIe 5.0 drives is much higher than what you can get from a PCIe 4.0 SSD, the random read and write performance bump is so low that you won't see any real-life improvement whatsoever. And random read and write performance or random input/output operations per second (random IOPS) is all you should care about when in the market for a new SSD.
Random IOPS performance represents real-life SSD performance because your operating system, games and apps installed on your drive, and files you manipulate when photo and video editing aren't stored in one place on the SSD. They're in fact scattered all around the memory chips found on the SSD and finding them is an action speed of which relies not on sequential but on random performance, on random IOPS.
Random IOPS numbers you can see in some SSD reviews represent the number of times per second an SSD can read and write a certain block of data under certain conditions represented by the Queue Depth or QD number, showing how many data requests are waiting to be written. The bigger the test file and the higher the QD number, the better the random read and write performance since SSDs work better with larger queue depths.
These Are the Test Results You Should Be Looking At
Random IOPS performance can get very complicated very fast because different tests use files of different sizes, and combine those files with different queue depths. Then we also have random read and random write IOPS results. However, as a regular user, you should only focus on random read 4KB QD1 test results (also known as random read 4K QD1 tests) because those results are the best representation of a real-life usage scenario when using an SSD as a boot drive.
So, when reading SSD reviews, focus on random read 4K QD1 test results. Tom's Hardware, for instance, includes random read 4K QD1 tests in their SSD reviews. TechPowerUp is another outlet that includes 4K QD1 random read tests. They also test SSDs in many real-life scenarios like loading times in various games, Adobe Photoshop CC and Premiere Pro editing and media importing benchmarks, Windows 11 boot time, etc.
If you just want to quickly check 4KB QD1 random read results, check Tom's Hardware reviews; if you want to look for more results, check TechPowerUp. Our recommendation is to read SSD reviews from both outlets to get the best picture of the performance of an SSD you're interested in.
Now, if we check Tom's Hardware review of the Crucial T700 we can see that, in the 4K QD1 random read test --- seventh image in the "Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark" section--- the T700 is behind a PCIe 4.0 SSD, the Samsung 990 Pro. So yeah, surprisingly, the fastest SSD when it comes to real-world performance is a PCIe 4.0 model.
Moving on to TechPowerUp's review of another PCIe 5.0 SSD, the Corsair MP700, we can see that when it comes to random read performance ---test results use data for different QD size but QD1 is by far the most important test, counting for 80% of the final score--- the first three places are held by PCIe 4.0 drives: the Kingston NV2, the XPG Gammix S70 Blade, and the MSI Spatium M450.
When it comes to Windows 11 startup time test, a PCIe 5.0 SSD ---Solidigm P44 Pro--- is first but the next eight places are reserved for PCIe 4.0 drives, with the boot time difference between the first and the tenth place being only 0.4 seconds. No one will notice that kind of difference. Finally, in game loading tests, we again have PCIe 4.0 SSDs matching or surpassing performance of PCIe 5.0 drives.
A Quality PCIe 4.0 SSD Is All You Need
As you just saw, there isn't a noticeable difference between the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs and PCIe 5.0 drives when it comes to 4K QD1 random read tests and real-life performance tests such as Windows 11 startup time, or game loading times.
In other words, if you're in the market for a new SSD, skip PCIe 5.0 models entirely. They're overpriced while not offering an iota of improvement when it comes to real-life performance metrics. Our recommendation is buying a quality PCIe 4.0 SSD, or even a solid PCIe 3.0 drive if you're looking for a storage drive and not a boot drive. If you're a PS5 owner, you should also skip PCIe 5.0 SSDs since the PS5 only supports PCIe 4.0 storage options.
A high-end PCIe 4.0 SSD offers great sequential read and write speeds, is more than fast enough to fulfill Microsoft's DirectStorage requirements, and its random read and write performance is in line with what PCIe 5.0 SSDs can achieve. Best of all, SSD prices are so low nowadays that high-end PCIe 4.0 drives with 1TB capacity cost less than $100, a price point that was not so long ago reserved for lower tier PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 SSDs.
You should start considering PCIe 5.0 SSDs only after they drop in price enough to be ~10% more expensive on average than high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Until that happens, getting a PCIe 5.0 SSD isn't worth it, unless you want to get one just because you always like to have the best and fastest hardware inside your PC. If that's the case, go for it. But everyone else should stick to PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 drives, at least for now.
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