The MP700 drive hasn’t been officially announced yet, but we already have an official graph promising continuous transfer speeds of up to 10,000MBps that dwarf anything currently available on the home NVMe market
There are quite a few advanced and particularly impressive storage drives that are offered in stores today, for modern Intel and AMD systems, with the ability to offer continuous transfer speeds of 7,000MBps and even a little beyond that – but the era of PCI-Express 5.0 is already approaching the tipping point with potential Double these figures, and it is expected to start its (expensive) run even before the end of the current year with the launch of the new generations of processors from both manufacturers. What performance can we get when the technology matures from words to practical products? At Corsair we join those who volunteer to demonstrate for us.
The American hardware company added on its official website an unexpected reference to its first MP700 drive, which has not yet been officially introduced but is expected to form the basis of the branding for its PCIe 5.0 generation storage products (similar to how all PCIe 4.0 generation storage models received some variation MP600 name) – with continuous transfer speeds of up to 10,000 MBps in reading and up to 9,500 MBps in writing that quite easily leaves dust to the best storage drives that can be purchased today.
The title of this fresh documentation promises to eliminate loading screens from our lives, with a fairly clear nod to gaming enthusiasts of all kinds – but in practice it seems to be a relatively superficial gimmick, since loading times in games are often a direct derivative of accessing many small executable files that will be mainly affected by the random performance of the drive and not of the continuous performance. However, even without any mention of the random performance, we have good reasons to believe that they will also improve by tens of percent with the transition to the PCI-Express 5.0 generation hardware, and will indeed be able to reduce the various loading times (but probably not completely eradicate them – sorry to explode the bubble, Corsair).
It is worth noting that speeds of 10,000MBps, or 10GBps, do not exhaust the full potential of the PCI-Express 5.0×4 interface that is expected to be available to the home M.2 connections in the next generation – and in the future may be considered as a sort of intermediate step in technological development, similar to How the first wave of NVMe drives in the current PCI-Express 4.0 generation reached continuous speeds of about 5,000MBps in most cases, while the second and more mature wave based on NAND chips and upgraded SSD controllers was able to use the full practical capabilities of the available bandwidth and touch at speeds of 7,000MBps. We’ve already seen preliminary announcements of Phison controllers that reach transfer rates of 13GBps and controllers from Silicon Motion and Innogrit that reach up to 14GBps on paper – all of which are intended for the home consumer market.
We do not yet know which SSD controllers Corsair will use in its MP700 models, which flash chips it will be based on, and in which volumes they can be found – but from the teaser it can be assumed (and hoped) that the launch itself is planned for the near future, when in addition it can be predicted that the opening prices At launch there will be ones capable of making even the best PCIe 4.0 drives feel like an affordable and exciting bargain. We hope to provide you with more details as soon as possible.