This week, consumer-grade PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives have finally hit the U.S. market, well over a year since the first client PC platforms supporting PCIe Gen5 became available. The new drives offer higher performance than the flagship PCIe 4 drives they supplant, albeit with some trade offs such as high prices and a greater need for good cooling. Meanwhile, for better or worse, the current crop of drives are largely interim solutions; as faster NAND becomes more readily available later this year, drive vendors will be able to push out even speedier drives based on the same controllers.
