MSI teases a PCIe 5.0 SSD that’s jaw-droppingly fast

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Next-gen Spatium SSD is going to be way faster than most PC owners realistically need

MSI Spatium PCIe 5 SSD teaser image
(Image credit: MSI)

MSI has given us a fleeting teaser of an incoming PCIe 5.0 SSD from the firm’s Spatium range of solid-state offerings.

The Spatium PCIe 5.0 SSD will run with the new Phison PS5026-E26 controller – which was revealed at CES 2022 – and is an add-in board which uses the NVMe 2.0 interface. As Wccftech spotted, MSI gave us a glimpse of the drive on Twitter, but with little info sadly.

As mentioned, we did hear about the Phison PS5026-E26 controller last week at CES, billed as targeted for heavyweight computing and high-end enthusiast gaming, and offering a rated performance of up to 12GB/s for read speeds and up to 11GB/s for writes.

In short, the next Spatium offering from MSI will be blisteringly fast, and it follows the current Spatium drives that were launched last year with PCIe 4.0 support and read speeds of 7GB/s and writes of 6.8GB/s (for the M480).

Analysis: Speed demon SSD, but not one you’ll need in the near future

PCIe 5.0 is still a tech of the future, really, even if drives are now being talked about as readying for launch before too long. Remember, Intel’s Alder Lake is the only platform to support the standard right now – and those 12th-gen chips only came out in November 2021, just a couple of months ago. AMD’s Ryzen silicon won’t support PCIe 5.0 until next-gen Zen 4 CPUs emerge later this year.

However, PCIe 5.0 isn’t something the average user needs to be remotely concerned about right now. The kind of performance on offer is overkill for these folks, and the first PCIe 5.0 SSDs to emerge will doubtless be stupidly expensive anyway. Realistically, PCIe 4.0 is currently plenty fast enough – and still has a good deal of headroom, in fact – for consumer storage drives.

We know Samsung has PCIe 5.0 coming in the form of an enterprise SSD with read speeds of up to 13GB/s, but that’s obviously not for consumers. Basically, in the near future, only serious applications such as AI are likely to feel the benefit of these high-performance SSDs. It’ll be much further out that PCIe 5.0 SSDs will be relevant for your average (or even enthusiast) PC owner, of course, and MSI hasn’t put any release date on its Spatium PCIe 5.0 model yet. It is, of course, promising to see a teaser this early in the year, though…

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Darren Allan

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).