TeamGroup's T-Force GE Pro PCIe 5 SSD Takes Flight At CES At A Breakneck 14GB/s
TeamGroup is launching its fastest solid state drive (SSD) yet and, according to the rated specifications, it will come close to saturating the PCI Express 5.0 x4 bus. To be more specific, TeamGroup's newly unveiled T-Force GE Pro SSD featuring 2,400MT/s NAND flash memory is rated to deliver sequential read speeds of up to 14,000MB/s (14GB/s).
Looking back, it took some time for SSD makers to take full (or at least mostly full) advantage of the PCIe 4.0 x4 bus. Initially, the fastest PCIe 4.0 models hovered around 5,000MB/s for sequential reads and writes. But once manufacturers hit their stride, we started to some models hit and surpass 7,000MB/s, some of which came very close to the maximum 7.88GB/s throughput.
Technically, the PCIe 5.0 x4 bus that the latest NVMe SSDs tap into provides up to 15.75GB/s of bandwidth. Overhead and other factors prevent drives from hitting the theoretical maximum throughput, but as we saw with the latter crop of blazing-fast PCIe 4.0 SSDs, it's only a matter of time before drive makers open up the floodgates and come awfully close.
How long that will take is anyone's guess. It was around this time last year when TeamGroup unveiled its Cardea Z540 PCIe 5.0 SSD with speeds of up to 12GB/s. Now just shy of a year later, the T-Force GE Pro kicks things into an even higher gear with a 16.7% higher sequential read ceiling.
TeamGroup's tapping InnoGrit's latest 12-nanometer IG5666 controller to take speeds to another level. Unfortunately, TeamGroup is not yet sharing the full spec sheet, so we don't know where sequential writes land, or the more important 4K random read and write metrics, which are more meaningful for general purpose computing and gaming.
TeamGroup's sole render of its new SSD only shows a graphene cooler, so it's unclear if a chunkier heatsink will come bundled. Managing heat is more important than ever in PCIe 5.0 territory, as those breakneck speeds can quickly throttle when temps get too high. TeamGroup says its latest SSD employs internal sensors to adjust performance as needed, to prevent overheating.
