Aorus announces NVMe PCIe Gen 4 SSDs with 5 GB/s read speeds

The PCIe 4.0 standard is starting to see increased adoption now that AMD has just announced support for this standard on the X570 platform releasing with the latest 7 nm Ryzen 3000 CPUs. We already know AMD’s Navi graphics cards will support the new standard, but there should also be a new wave of M.2 SSDs that benefit from the increased bandwidth offered by PCIe 4.0 connections, and among the first companies to offer such devices is Aorus with the latest NVMe Gen 4 SSDs.

Integrating a 28nm Phison PS5016-E16 controller, the new Aorus Gen 4 SSDs can deliver 40% higher sequential read / write speeds compared to Gen 3 models. The controller also supports eight NAND channels with 32 CE targets, comes with DDR4 RAM cache and utilizes X4 PCIe 4.0 lanes. Additional supported features include NVMe 1.3 protocol, LDPC error correction, and Wear Leveling / Over-Provision protections to improve memory integrity and durability.

As for the NAND memory chips themselves, the Aorus SSDs integrate Toshiba’s BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC stacks capable of reaching 800 MT/s. Coupled with the Phison controller and the PCIe 4.0 bandwidth, these memory chips can provide sequential read speeds of ~5,000 MB/s and sequential write speeds of ~4,400 MB/s.

Unique to the Aorus models are the copper heatsinks that cover both sides of the PCB. Compared to regular aluminum-based sinks, the copper ones are said to offer 69% better thermal conductivity, as the temperatures are lowered by 14%.

Aorus has not yet released pricing and availability information, but the new SSDs will be available in 1 TB and 2 TB variants, with random reads rated at 750K IOPs and random writes hitting 700K IOPs.