Samsung 256TB And 512TB PCIe 6 SSDs Are On The Storage Horizon For Massive Capacity And Bandwidth

At FMS 2025, Samsung has debuted its next generation of server-grade PCIe storage with the Samsung MVP PCIe 6 SSD, available in capacities of 256TB and 512TB. That's no typo, either—we're looking at up to 512 terabytes of storage per drive, or half an entire petabyte. While we don't yet know the final storage speed specification of these PCIe 6 SSDs, we have a pretty good idea of how they'll perform based on how the PCIe 6 standard builds upon PCIe 5. Per-lane bandwidth has doubled with each generation of PCI Express, and Micron's 9650 PCIe 6 SSDs have already been observed reaching real-world speeds as high as 28 GB/s. This means we can expect Samsung's SSDs to reach roughly the same range, and this is still the early days of the tech; one day, we may even see single PCIe6 SSDs operate as fast as 30 GB/s or more.



Now, there are some necessary disclaimers to be made here. First and foremost, it's not like this suddenly obsoletes the current PCIe 5.0 SSDs—they are more than fast enough for virtually all workloads, especially consumer tasks and particularly PC games that have yet to really utilize PCI Express storage to its fullest extent. Right now, PCIe Gen 6 SSDs are targeted solely at the high-end datacenter and high-performance computing spaces, particularly those tackling AI training workloads, which need to shove around vast amounts of data. It'll likely take some time for PCIe 6 SSDs to enter the consumer space at all; even PCI Express 5.0 SSDs haven't exactly flown off the shelves due to their high cost per gigabyte and limited practical utility over PCIe 4.0 SSDs. 

PCIe 6 SSDs will eventually come to consumer and HEDT desktops, though. While games are unlikely to utilize the added bandwidth any time in the near future, there are still workloads like editing 4K and 8K video that would benefit immensely from the addition of yet-faster solid-state storage. There's also the potential for reducing lane count while retaining overall performance, which has the upshot of allowing consumer systems to connect more storage. Overall, though, the continued march toward faster, higher-capacity SSDs should lead to modern SSDs becoming cheaper as the new products begin to take their place in the market. Other factors like tariffs or material shortages may impact that forecast, though.

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