Here comes another wicked-fast PCIe 4.0 SSD

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You'll need a third-gen Ryzen PC to take full advantage of this drive.

(Image credit: Adata)

Adata is back with another M.2 SSD announcement, it's second for the month of July, and this time its new drive is rocking a PCI Express 4.0 interface (the SSD line it announced earlier this month sticks to the budget-friendly SATA interface). As we have seen with other PCIe 4.0 models that have recently cropped up, rated speeds are blazing fast on this one.

Specifically, Adata's new XPG Gammix S50 is rated to deliver up to 5,000MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 4,400MB/s of sequential write performance. Those figures are on par with what other PCIe 4.0 SSDs are touting.

In case you missed it, AMD is the first to support the PCIe 4.0 spec, which effectively doubles the bandwidth of the previous generation PCIe 3.0 standard that is much more commonly found. The added bandwidth can eventually pave the way for faster graphics cards (for the most part, the PCIe bus is not a bottleneck for GPUs right now), and in the shorter term, we are seeing it leveraged by faster SSDs.

There have been a handful of models announced by the likes of Corsair, Gigabyte (Aorus), and others. To take full advantage of these drives, you will need a third-generation Ryzen PC built around an X570 motherboard. Some X470 motherboards can technically be updated (via BIOS) to support PCIe 4.0, but primarily to avoid confusion, AMD has told motherboard makers not to do that.

Cooling is also going to be key to both hitting the rated speeds, and maintaining performance. That's why we are seeing chunkier heatsinks on these new drives.

Adata is offering the S50 in two capacities: 2TB and 1TB. There is no word yet on how much either drive costs or when they will be available. Both are backed by a 5-year warranty.

All that said, the kinds of storage speeds being touted on PCIe 4.0 are overkill for gaming. Even a 2.5-inch SATA drive can be the best SSD for gaming, when factoring in bang-for-buck.

Paul Lilly
Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).