Consumer PCIe Gen 5 Gaming SSDs Arrive For Sale In Japan At A Smoking 10GB/s
Have you ever heard of CFD Gaming? Neither have we, but the company appears to be first to market with a Phison-based PCIe 5.0 SSD. The M.2 NVMe drive has appeared in shops in Japan's famous Akihabara technology district with a 2TB capacity and a claimed maximum sequential read speed of 10 GB/sec.
This information comes to us by way of Impress PC Watch's Akiba PC Hotline blog, who writes that these drives were actually announced in October of 2022 and scheduled for release in November, but that the release was postponed. The drive will apparently come in 1TB and 4TB capacities as well as 2TB.
Akiba PC Hotline quotes the maximum performance values for the 2TB model at 10GB/sec and 9.5GB/sec on sequential reads and writes respectively, while random performance comes in at 1.5 million IOPS on reads and 1.25 million IOPS on writes. Those values are surely at unrealistically-high queue depths, but they're impressive nonetheless.
In the pictures, the drive itself strongly resembles the Phison E26 reference platform that we got to take for a spin a few weeks ago. Even the included cooler, which Akiba PC Hotline reports is permanently-attached and cannot be removed from the SSD, looks very similar to the one on the reference SSD we were loaned for testing. The vendor itself recommends against installing the SSD in systems with poor airflow, as it apparently gets quite warm.
The blog shows a photograph of a physical price listing at a shop in Akiba that puts the drive down for a price of 49,980¥, or around $385 USD. That's a seriously hefty price for a 2TB SSD, but we suppose it is the first of its kind in the consumer market. Hopefully these drives are more reasonably-priced when they hit the wider market, which should happen any day now.
Images in this post from Akiba PC Hotline.
