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Corsair is teasing its first PCIe 5.0 SSD, dubbed the MP700. A page on Corsair’s website covers a few details about its upcoming next-generation memory, and it boasts some impressive figures. At the moment Corsair is focusing on AM5 support, but Intel users will also get to make use of this for Raptor Lake as well. It’s assumed that the MP700 will launch this year, alongside AMD’s Ryzen 7000 Series release.
The MP700 looks to be a major improvement over the MP600 Pro XT in terms of bandwidth. In fact, the MP700 offers a read speed of 10,000 MB/s, and a write speed of 9,500 MB/s. For comparison, the MP600 Pro XT has read and write speed of 7,100 MB/s and 5,800 MB/s, respectively. The jump in speed is thanks to the increased bandwidth laid out in the PCIe 5.0 spec.
PCIe 5.0 SSDs will be for enthusiasts
The extra speed that PCIe 5.0 gives next-generation SSDs doubles that over the prior generation. However, in terms of its gaming application, upgrading to PCIe 5.0 is questionable right now, as we’ve previously discussed. We’re at a point where games don’t make the most of the best SSDs available. An even more powerful SSD isn’t going to have a massive impact on framerates or load times.
Until games arrive that utilize DirectStorage and take advantage of other benefits of fast SSDs, PCIe 5.0 will just be a pricey future-proofing measure. However, there will be exceptions for content creators in applications such as video editing where it’s useful to quickly move large files around.
(Image credit: Corsair).
Either way, it’s exciting to see that Corsair already has a PCIe 5.0 SSD coming to market. And with the MP700, we’re seeing some impressive figures. As of now, there’s no release date for the new SSD since Corsair is merely teasing it. The website showing the SSD off only shows the basic specs too, so there’s still a lot we don’t know. But given the imminent release of AMD’s Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs, we’re likely to see the MP700 sometime this year. Whether its release will be alongside the new processors or later on in the year is something we’ll have to wait to find out.
