It seems like it’s taken forever for the latest and greatest storage standard to release an updated spec, but the wait is over. Gigabyte’s Aurous Gen5 SSDs, which appear to be the very first PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives to hit the market, are now available for purchase. You can get this super-fast drive, rated for read speeds up to 9,500 megabytes per second, right now…if you can find it in stock, and you’ve been saving your pennies.
The Aurous Gen5 10000 comes in both 1TB and 2TB capacities, with that massive passive cooler included in the package (you can install it in an 80mm M.2 slot with or without the cooler). According to Tom’s Hardware, the retail price of the 2TB capacity was briefly shown at $350 on Newegg…before it instantly went out of stock, both there and on Amazon. So the drives are going out, but you’ll have to be extremely lucky to get one of the first ones.
Of course in order to actually take advantage of the incredible speed capacity of PCIe 5.0, you’ll need a motherboard that can handle it. Those have been on the market for over a year just waiting for the drives to arrive. If you can wait a little longer, Samsung, Corsair, MSI, Patriot, and others should have competing drives out sometime this year or early next.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer
Michael is a former graphic designer who's been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.