After Sony’s PlayStation 5 announcement, PC gamers felt left in the dust somewhat due to the console’s absurd 5.5 GB/S SSD that sped right past the fastest NVMe SSDs on the PC market.
Now, however, Gigabyte appears ready to restore balance to the universe with its AORUS Gen4 8TB AIC SSD solution. While it’s out for some time now, this remains, as far as we know, the single fastest integrated SSD storage solution in the market with sequential read/write at a frankly shocking 15,000 MB/s.
How exactly does Gigabyte manage to deliver that incredible level of performance? The 8TB setup is configured with RAID0 in mind. You’ll need to be running it in RAID0 mode in order to make use of the 15 GB/s transfer rate. In a conventional JBOD setup, you’ll see transfers speeds slightly less than 4 GB/S, not bad by any measure, but not nearly as impressive as the PlayStation 5. It’s the need for RAID0 that necessitates that massive 8TB storage pool – disk striping takes place across all 4 disks.
There are major caveats, however. For starters, the AORUS 8TB AIC board costs an insane amount of money at US$1899. Next, the AIC board needs 16 PCIe lanes to deliver full throughout. The only consumer level motherboards to even feature PCIe 4.0 lanes are AMD’s X570 and B550 boards, which feature up to 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes. You wouldn’t be able to run the SSD setup full-speed alongside a graphics card because there simply aren’t enough PCIe lanes to go around. You would need to get hold of a Threadripper processor and a TRX40 motherboard to even run this full speed, and that can easily cost as much as the board itself.
Regardless, in our opinion, while these speeds are quite impressive, you don’t really need it. A standard PCIe 4.0 based SSD will load most games in a matter of seconds. Hell, even a Gen3 drive will do so. The deltas here won’t be perceivable. The rest is just markering gimmick from Sony and Co.
But if you’re fine with a US$5000 outlay, you might just be able to build yourself a rig with 15 GB/S of storage throughout.
