Gaming SSDs won't get much quicker for at least five years, says drive maker

It's going to be a long wait before we see a PCIe 6.0 gaming SSD, according to the head of SSD controller manufacturer Silicon Motion. In an interview, the company's founder and CEO, Wallace C. Kou, says that we're not going to get a PCIe 6.0 SSD "until 2030," with PCIe 5.0 SSDs providing the ceiling of storage performance in desktop PCs for the next five years.

Silicon Motion makes the controllers for many of the best gaming SSD designs around right now, including the new super-fast WD Black SN8100, which already gets close to saturating the PCIe 5.0 bus with its immense sequential read speed of 14,900MB/s. We've also already seen a PCIe 6.0 SSD demonstrated at Computex, but when it comes to PC gaming hardware, it looks as though there's not much interest in progressing to this new standard for SSDs.

In an interview with Tom's Hardware, Wallace C. Kou is asked when we might see the first PCIe 6.0 SSDs. "For consumer? You will not see any PCIe Gen6 [solutions] until 2030," he replies. The reason he cites is a strong lack of interest in making PCIe 6.0 SSDs in the industry, not just from SSD manufacturers, but also Intel and AMD, presumably when it comes to implementing chipset support.

"PC OEMs have very little interest in PCIe 6.0 right now," says Kou, "they do not even want to talk about it. AMD and Intel do not want to talk about it." The situation provides some comfort to Kou, given Silicon Motion's current strong position in the PCIe 5.0 SSD controller market. "We dominate PCIe 5.0, both 8-channel and 4-channel controllers," he says. "For the next four years, we will be in a comfortable position to continue growing in the client market."

The first PCIe 5.0 SSDs started appearing early in 2023, nearly doubling the maximum sequential speeds of their PCIe 4.0 predecessors, but also needing large-scale coolers to cope with their heat output, and often not proving massively quicker in real-world benchmarks. It took another two years before the Samsung 9100 Pro was released, followed by WD's latest drives, but it now looks as though it's going to be a five-year wait before we see another substantial speed boost, at least when it comes to 4x PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives.

In the meantime, check out our WD Black SN8100 review to see how the current fastest gaming SSD actually performs, and you can read our SSD install guide if you're thinking of upgrading too.

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