Samsung’s first PCIe 5.0 SSD is here and it’s stupidly fast

Samsung’s new PM1743 might be aimed at servers, but as the first PCIe 5.0 SSD to arrive, it should still excite storage nerds about what’s likely to come for consumers.

The PM1743 offers essentially twice the potential bandwidth of PCIe 4.0-based drives. Doubling the interface doesn’t mean much if the unit can’t use it, but the PM1743 seems to suck up speeds. Samsung officials said the drive is capable of 13,000 MBps read speeds and 2,500K IOPS random read speeds.

That adds up to a smooth performance boost from 1.9x to 1.7x compared to Samsung’s impressive PCIe 4.0 drives. Write speeds are rated at 6,600MBps, with 250K IOPS random write speeds, which is also nearly double that of previous Samsung drives.

Samsung said the drive will be offered in capacities from 1.92TB to 15.36TB in the traditional 2.5-inch form factor or the newer 3-inch EDSFF “ruler” form factor. The company expects to begin mass production of the unit in the first quarter of 2022.

So what does the arrival of Samsung’s first PCIe 5.0 SSD mean for consumers? It’s always a chicken-or-egg scenario with new standards, but now that the first PCIe 5.0 desktops are finally here with Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs, you can guess that consumer-centric PCIe 5.0 SSDs with Tempting double-digit read speeds are all the rage. the works too. Hopefully we’ll start to see PCIe 5.0 drives show up in our roundup of the best SSDs sooner rather than later.