Adata XPG PCIe Gen5 SSD: New M.2 SSDs get up to 14 GB/s

With the new Adata XPG PCIe Gen5 SSD, the manufacturer’s new storage product is slowly but surely going into production. After a prototype was already shown, the model is now close to series production. Speeds of up to 14 GB/s are realized and that with a capacity of up to 8 TB.

Adata XPG PCIe Gen5 SSD officially presented

At the Meraverse Exhibit, the Adata XPG PCIe Gen5 SSD was officially unveiled after they confirmed its existence as a prototype back at CES 2022. Now they presented the production-ready SSD together with the XPG Caster and XPG Slayer DDR5 RAM series, as well as a new gaming mouse called XPG Alpha.

The Adata XPG PCIe Gen5 SSD is connected via the PCIe 5.0 x4 interface and comes in M.2 format. An SM2508 controller from Silicon Motion is hidden under the heatsink, which is supposed to provide a sequential read speed of up to 14 GB/s, as well as 12 GB/s in sequential write.

Thus, the Adata SSD almost completely utilizes the interface’s maximum possible bandwidth of 16 GB/s and achieves almost twice the speeds that current top models with PCIe 4.0 x4 connections are capable of.

With random 4K transfers, up to 1.8 million IOPS for reading and 1.6 million IOPS for writing should be possible. Capacities of up to eight terabytes are also enabled in the Adata XPG PCIe Gen5 SSD.

XPG SSD: Project Nighthawk goes into series production

This is the Project Nighthawk prototype, which Adata had already promised by the end of 2021. It relies on a centrally located controller, two NAND packages and two DRAM devices.

At the same time, they introduced another PCIe 5.0 SSD, Project Blackbird, which promised speeds of up to 14 GB/s read and 10 GB/s write. The IG5666 controller from Innogrit is used here.

However, there was no trace of this model at the Metaverse Exhibit. It is unclear whether the prototype has been discarded again or whether it will be put alongside the faster M.2 SSD later this year.

The great unknown: Silicon Motion SM2508

Meanwhile, there is still a lot of information missing about the Silicon Motion SM2508 controller. At least we know that it is connected via PCIe 5.0 x4 and supports PVMe 2.0. However, not much more is known.

With the Phison E26, there is a similarly positioned PCIe 5.0 controller that also comes with NVMe 2.0 support and PCIe 5.0 x4 connectivity. It performs, at least in the MSI Spatium SSD prototype, speeds of 12 GB/s in sequential read and up to 11 GB/s in sequential write. This would make Silicon Motion’s model significantly faster again, at least on paper.