Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 10000: The first PCIe 5.0 SSD makes a splash

This first-generation PCle 5.0 SSD offers easily the fastest sustained transfer rates of any drive we've tested

- JON JACOBI

Gigabyte's Aorus Gen5 10000 is easily the fastest single NVMe SSD we've tested. Being the first PCle 5.0 drive we've tested, that's hardly surprising. But it is quite delightful to see a drive sustain reads and writes over 10GBps.

SPECS

The Aorus Gen5 10000 wouldn't be much to look at on its own. It's your usual 2280 (22mm wide, 80mm long) M.2 NVMe SSD with a plainish black label. That's if you omit the massive heatsink that Gigabyte provides. And I mean massive. See below.

This heatsink is overkill for most users, and during our benchmarking the drive ran relatively cool, never once threatening to throttle during multiple benchmark runs.

The Gen5 10000 uses Phison’s new E26 controller and the latest 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Though the drive is not widely available yet, we did see it available online for $340 in the 2TB flavor we tested. That’s roughly twice what a bargain 2TB PCIe 4.0 drive will cost, and three times the price of a PCIe 3.0 SSD.

The drive is covered by a limited five-year warranty. The limit is a 700TBW (terabytes that may be written) per 1TB of capacity rating. That’s not very generous given the rather steep pricing, though some of that pricing reflects the presence of the huge heatsink.

PERFORMANCE 

Does PCIe 5 make a difference? Yes—big time, if you go by synthetic benchmarks; marginally, if you go by real-world transfers. As you can see below, the Aorus Gen5 10000 destroyed the competition in CrystalDiskMark 8’s sustained throughput tests.