If you're still running an old SATA SSD for your main boot and game drive, it might be soon time to upgrade as things are getting out of hand in the SSD space. The current generation PCIE 4 SSDs are something incredible, with some sustained reads as high as 7GBps, but that's nothing compared to their incoming sequels. The next-generation PCIE 5 drives from the likes of ADATA, can already hit read speeds as high as 14GBps.
These new drives combine a new PCIE 5 interface, with a new advanced controller, and higher density memory chips, to offer drives with that level of staggering performance, with capacities that range from 1TB all the way up to 8TB. There will be slower 12GBps and 10GBps read speed drives, which will be more affordable, but the gold standard drives will be exceedingly fast.
To put that into context, it's almost 28 times the sustained read speed of a traditional SATA SSD.
The only downside to all this is that there are no motherboards that support M.2 drives with this kind of interface, just yet. However, MSI is working on a new expander for its motherboards, and you can always plug them into PCIE riser cards on compatible Z690 motherboards.
AMD doesn't have any compatible with PCIE 5 drives just yet, but its Zen 4 CPUs, coming in 2022, are likely to add it.
