2023 was a great year for storage, with the first consumer PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs finally hitting the market. At the other end of the spectrum, prices for copious amounts of storage plummeted to record lows. Both are exciting trends, though prices are now on the rise, and long-term we're more interested in high-performance drives.
The Crucial T700 SSD kicked things off, sporting the Phison E26 controller with the latest Micron 232-layer TLC NAND. We've seen many other SSDs using effectively the same hardware — Adata Legend 970, Corsair MP700, Gigabyte Gen5 10000 and Gen5 12000, Inland TD510, Nextorage NN5Pro and NE5N, Seagate FireCuda 540, and Teamgroup Z540 — though Crucial had first dibs on higher clocked 2000 MT/s NAND while the competition had to make do with 1600 MT/s chips for a while, and no one has shipped an E26 drive with 2400 MT/s NAND yet. The Aorus Gen5 12000, NN5Pro, and Teamgroup Z540 all offer faster NAND as well now, though in practice there's not a massive difference between most of these drives other than the heatsink — and potentially annoying tiny fans.
Performance ends up peaking at around 12 GB/s for sequential transfers, a speed that the T700 can only maintain for about 22 seconds before the pSLC cache gets filled up and it has to start writing at a more sedate ~3.6 GB/s. Real-world file copies are also very fast, averaging over 2.6 GB/s. Price is certainly a concern with the new generation of PCIe 5.0 SSDs, but if you want maximum storage performance, we'll need to wait a few years for PCIe 6.0 hardware to begin shipping.
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