SO SOLID CREW

Rejoice, for ridiculously quick PCle Gen 4 drives are now almost mainstream. Jeremy Laird chooses from six of the speediest NAND SSDs

- Jeremy Laird

IT TOOK ITS MERRY TIME. But with the latest 12th Gen Alder Lake CPU family, Intel can finally support PCle Express Gen 4 on the desktop. Better 18 months later than AMD and its PCIe 4.0-capable Ryzen 3000 CPUs than never, huh?

Whatever. You now have free reign to build a PC based on a platform from either of the core hardware vendors without worrying about interconnect spec. As for why PCle 4.0 matters, as ever, it comes down to speed. If you want the fastest connection speed for peripherals, you need PCIe Gen 4. And if there's a single component that benefits most from more PCIe bandwidth, it's storage.

Gen 4 doubles theoretical bandwidth over Gen 3 to fully 8GB/s in both directions. Thanks to AMD's early move in the Gen 4 space, there are already a wealth of PCI Express Gen 4 drives to choose from and several get remarkably close to the full capability of the interconnect.

What's more, SSDs have avoided the debilitating price rises suffered by some PC components over the past year or two. Now, you not only get more speed but also more storage for less money. By CPU and GPU standards, a multi-TB SSD is positively affordable. None of which means, however, that all Gen 4 drives are equal. So, it's time to find out how six of the very best perform.

Crucial P5 Plus 1TB

JUST NINE DOLLARS. That's how much extra you currently have to pay for the Crucial P5 Plus 1TB with PCle Gen 4 capability over the older Crucial P5 Gen 3 drive. The plain old P5, should we need to remind you, returns barely more than half the performance by several measures. Even if you don't have a Gen 4 capable rig right now, it surely makes sense to go with the Gen 4 drive and future-proof your storage for any possible CPU and motherboard upgrade.