The storage manufacturer from Sony successfully demonstrates transfer speeds of more than 10,000MBps in reading and writing alongside reasonable temperatures
The Nextorage brand was created by Sony to provide a solution for high-quality home storage expansion in the PlayStation 5 consoles, but it seems that it is now ready to expand beyond the limits of the living room console with its own PCI-Express 5.0 drives that will add tens of percent of performance beyond what the gaming machine knows and is able to utilize , hoping to compete with more well-known and established names in the PC market that are also vigorously preparing to celebrate the performance (and prices, most likely) in the new generation.
A teaser for Nextorage’s first PCIe 5 drive landed back last September, and now we have documentation from a Japanese YouTuber who visited the company’s facilities and was given the opportunity to further and more detailed documentation of the future model and its intended performance.
A number of photos he took and published prove the practical ability of the drive, which will be offered in known volumes of 1TB and 2TB first, to reach continuous transfer speeds higher than 10,000MBps both in writing and reading, which in turn will be an improvement of at least 35 percent compared to Gen 4 drives The most advanced available today.
It is true that these are speeds that do not utilize the full potential of the M.2 interface with four PCI-Express 5.0 lanes available inside it, but considering that this Nextorage model is based on TLC memories of the current generation, with a structure of 176 internal layers (probably from Micron) – This seems to be the best we can hope for in the first launch wave of the new era drives, while models with even more advanced controllers and flash chips that scrape speeds of 14,000MBps will likely be saved for the second launch wave later in 2023.
The YouTuber also documented the drive in a naked configuration, without a heat sink, and even reported that in a performance test performed on the unit in this condition, the NAND chips themselves reached a temperature of no less than 77 degrees Celsius, compared to 59 degrees Celsius when there is a heat sink that helps in the effective transport and distribution of The heat generated – when it can be assumed that in such a situation the internal temperature of the storage controller, the “brain” of the product, was even higher. Another indirect evidence that in the next generation it will be very difficult to avoid the use of passive heat sinks at the very least, and perhaps even active heat sinks of some kind, not only in the available performance aspects but also from considerations of maintaining the health and reliability of the advanced silicon pieces inside over time.
For dessert, we got a little surprise when the kind reviewer revealed that the official metal heatsink with which the drive will be offered doesn’t really resemble the strange and special concept that was presented to the world in September – then it was a black metal body with a large number of thin rectangular pillars that stretch upwards from the printed circuit board. The new cooling is apparently more compact (which is a good thing), but it will still be unusual in its form – so there is another good reason to keep following it, beyond our natural desire to get hints about the price levels that await us, and the planned launch dates of course.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed that everything will start to become clearer and clearer starting from the upcoming CES exhibition in early January 2023.