Best PCIe 5.0 SSDs in 2025

The newest, fastest standard for M.2 SSDs, PCIe 5.0, has been around for a couple of years but only recently brought a consumer release for the fastest M.2 SSDs. The first crop of M.2 NVMe SSDs using this standard promised speeds of 10,000MB/s or higher. The second wave is now here, with promised speeds of 14,000MB/s or even up to 16,000MB/s, close to the theoretical limits of the PCIe 5.0 specification. The second wave is now in stores, but is still at a price premium, so we've collected both the first and second waves in one place to help you choose. Just keep in mind that you need a motherboard that supports PCIe 5.0, which is available on AMD’s AM5 platform, or some Intel motherboards that support 12-gen Intel CPUs and beyond.

It's worth mentioning that all the currently available PCIe 5.0 SSDs use a common core of components. They all use the same controller, the E26 from Phison, which is explained by our sister site HowToGeek as essentially the "brain" of the SSD. This chip controls where data gets written to and read from in the storage portion, and it also handles important security and longevity tasks like encryption and error correction. The other component that all current PCIe 5.0 SSDs use is Micron’s 232-layer TLC NAND, which has a transfer rate of 2,400 MT/s and gives more bandwidth to your SSD to work faster overall. Both of these add together to get the high sequential transfer speeds of PCIe 5.0 SSDs, with the minor differences between drives showing which companies are better at optimizing their firmware.

I personally have two of the PCIe 5.0 SSDs on this list inside my personal PC, a 2TB Crucial T700 as my boot drive, and a 2TB Seagate FireCuda 540 that I use to store games and other programs that I benchmark from. Other team members have tested most of the drives on this list, and that's why our list comes mainly from real-world testing. Before this, it was put together from the available drives on the market, but the good news is that our testing has overall confirmed the manufacturers' claims for speed.

These are the best PCIe 5.0 SSDs to buy in 2024

The Crucial T700 is perhaps the best PCIe 5.0 SSD you can buy right now. It may not be the outright fastest drive on the market with 11,700 MB/s max read speeds and 9,500 MB/s write speeds in sequential transfers but it’s one of the cheaper drives. You can expect to pay only a few dollars more per drive than the most affordable PCIe NVMe SSDs. Our testing showed max speeds of 12,398 MB/s reads, and 11,814 MB/s writes, higher than Crucial's seemingly conservative marketing numbers. We also recommend this over the Crucial T705 because, while that drive is faster in straight transfers, it's also significantly more expensive.

The drive comes in an M.2 2280 single-side form factor with an NVMe controller, a DRAM chip, and two flash packages. Those flash packages use Micron’s 232-layer TLC NAND3, which has a maximum speed of 2.4GB/s. Crucial has an edge because Micron is its parent company, and it gets access to the newer technology first, so its SSDs are optimized accordingly.

The T700 drive is available in capacities of 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB, with or without heatsinks. We should mention that PCIe 5.0 SSDs run hot, so you will want a heatsink for them to work properly. The options with already-attached heatsinks are for motherboards that don’t already have onboard metal heatsinks to keep things cool. We noticed in our testing that the drive started to thermal throttle under peak loads, with a temperature of 81 degrees Celsius. You'll definitely want to keep this spicy drive well-cooled.

The drive also supports Microsoft’s DirectStorage, which enables your graphics card and SSD to transfer data to each other without it first going through the CPU. This reduces loading times for textures and other assets while lowering CPU utilization. Only a handful of current games support this, like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and Forsaken, but others are coming. It's backed by a five-year warranty, which seems to be the standard for this generation.

The Corsair MP700 is the first PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD from the company. It is a barebone M.2 drive with the 2280 form factor, which means it doesn’t come with a heatsink. Maybe that’s okay because it’s the cheapest drive on this list while still keeping pace with the pack. Corsair also sells an NVMe waterblock if you are worried about temperatures or don’t have a motherboard with integrated heatsinks. It's worth mentioning that the successor, the MP700 Pro SE, is available and has shown itself to be the fastest PCIe 5.0 NVMe drive so far, but the higher price makes it fairly prohibitive unless you absolutely need to have the best thing available.

This drive comes in two capacities, 1TB and 2TB. We tested the 1TB model and found it outperformed Corsair's claims of at least 9,500MB/s read and 8,500MB/s write. While we haven't tried the 2TB, Corsair says that it can get up to 10,000MB/s for both read and write. They also have 700TBW endurance per TB of capacity, so you don't lose out on longevity even with the lower price. It's also worth mentioning that there is the more expensive and faster Corsair MP700 Pro, which we've also tested, and it's a scorcher at 12,389MB/s read speeds and 11,666MB/s write speeds. While that was the fastest SSD we've ever tested, it also ran hot and needed a huge heatsink and active cooling to avoid thermal throttling. That makes the non-Pro version a better option for most consumers.

The MSI Spatium M570 uses the slightly slower 176-layer Micron NAND, which is rated at 1,600GB/s. That means it has a theoretical maximum of 10,000MB/s, and MSI has managed to squeeze every MB/s of performance out of the controller that every other drive on this list also uses. MSI makes this SSD in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB configurations, and a Pro version with a huge heatsink is rolling out. We've had hands-on experience with the M570, and it over-performed MSI's marketing, coming in at 10,084MB/s read speeds and 10,201MB/s write speeds. It's not the fastest drive on the market, but it's still a solid option.

The Spatium M570 has an attached heatsink with stacked fins in an attractive bronze coloring. This is easily removable by unscrewing some bolts along the sides, so it is a good option even if your motherboard already has heatsinks built in. The drives have up to 1,400TBW of endurance, with the 1TB model only having 700TBW, which aligns with other manufacturers’ endurance ratings. MSI also warrants these for five years.

It’s worth mentioning the upcoming M570 Pro model again. It will have sequential read speeds of up to 12,000MB/s and write speeds of up to 10,000/MB/s. That’s because it uses the newer 232-layer Micron NAND, which has been in low supply until recently.

The Teamgroup T-Force Cardea Z540 is the best and fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD released to date, with on-paper specifications of up to 12,000MB/s speeds for both reads and writes, thanks to Crucial's 232-layer 3D TLC NAND, which can reach 2,400MB/s speeds. This was mostly what we found in our testing, with 12,391MB/s maximum sequential reads and 11,701MB/s sequential writes on an empty drive. As capacity is filled on any SSD, performance drops as the controller needs to hunt for data space, but the Z540 is still among the top-performing SSDs we've ever tested, even at 90% full.

As with many other Gen 5 SSDs, the T-Force Cardea Z540 has an endurance of 700TBW per 1TB of capacity. That, on its own, makes the 2TB or higher capacities instantly more attractive, and when you factor in that the larger capacities are also slightly faster, we're not sure why anyone would buy a 1TB PCIe 5.0 drive. Buy the larger 2TB capacity of this drive if you can, and you'll have a speedy, large capacity drive to last for several years. It's also worth mentioning that, like all other Gen 5 drives, they benefit from cooling more than Gen 4 drives did. Whether that's an active cooler with a fan or liquid cooling, or a passive cooler if you prefer, it's just another important thing to consider with your purchase.

The Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 12000 is aptly named, given that it has sequential read speeds of up to 12,400MB/s and write speeds of up to 11,800MB/s. This is the second generation of PCIe 5.0 drives, able to reach higher speeds. It uses Phison’s E26 controller and the latest 232-layer 3D TLC NAND from Micron. This flash has 2,400GB/s maximum speeds and runs close to those theoretical limits. We found the 1TB slightly slower than advertised, and we'd recommend the larger 2TB capacity, both for its speed and value.

Gigabyte is currently selling 1TB and 2TB capacities for this drive, which comes with a five-year warranty and 700TBW of endurance per 1TB of capacity. That’s on par with the competition. Gigabyte also supplies a mammoth heatsink with this drive, which has two heat pipes going into a large fin stack like on CPU air coolers. This is probably overkill, as most manufacturers are offering lower-profile aluminum heatsinks. Still, it’s nice to know that Gigabyte was thinking about heat, as lower heat overall will likely give your SSD a longer life span.

Inland might not be a name you recognize, but you probably know of its parent company, MicroCenter. The in-house brand for SSDs is getting into the PCIe 5.0 market early with the Inland TD510. This model has sequential reads up to 10,000MB/s and writes up to 9,500MB/s. It’s not the fastest, but it’s also not the slowest, and this drive has other things going for it.

It was the first PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD on the market, beating the competition by a slim margin. The drive comes in an M.2 2280 single-sided form factor and comes in capacities of 1TB and 2TB. The chunky heatsink keeps things cool under sustained transfers and has a tiny fan that supposedly helps. It will be annoyingly noisy though, as tiny fans often are, so you might want to leave it unplugged. That heatsink can be removed if your motherboard already has integrated heatsinks.

This drive has a six-year warranty, which outpaces the average of five. It has an endurance rating of 700TBW per 1TB of capacity (meaning the 2TB model will have a 1400TBW endurance rating), which should mean this SSD will last you for a very long time before it needs replacing.

Seagate is one of the biggest names in storage, so it makes sense that it would be one of the early options in the PCIe 5.0 SSD market. The FireCuda 540 SSD is an M.2 2280 form-factor drive, only available without a heatsink option. It comes in 1TB and 2TB capacities, with the higher capacity reaching up to 10,000MB/s for sequential reads and writes. The smaller capacity caps out at 9,500MB/s for reads and 8,500MB/s for writes. Our testing showed max speeds of 10,065MB/s reads and 10,199MB/s writes, which is in line with Seagate's claims.

This drive has a five-year warranty, but you might get to the end of that before you have any issues with your SSD. That’s because it has one of the highest endurance ratings of all the PCIe 5.0 SSDs, with 1000TBW per 1TB of capacity. That gives you 2000TBW for a 2TB capacity drive, or enough to rewrite 1TB of data every single day for over five years. That’s an extreme data transfer number, and most users won’t get anywhere near this figure with their daily use.

The only bad point here is that the price is similar to drives that come with a heatsink, while not actually coming with a heatsink. Some users might appreciate not having to unbolt or unpeel a heatsink to fit their drive onto their motherboard, and I’m one of them. The ease of use of a bare NVMe SSD is more useful to me than having to figure out which M.2 slot I can use. You will want to cool the drive properly under sustained loads though, as our testing showed temperatures of up to 86 C.

The Fanxiang S900 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD rounds up this list, being the only other PCIe 5.0 SSD available. Although I was unfamiliar with the name until now, it comes with every specification of the better-known brands, so it deserves a place here.

The M.2 2280 form-factor drive has sequential read and write speeds of up to 10,000MB/s and up to 1,500K IOPS for random read and write speeds. That’s on par with any drive here except for our top choice, the Crucial T700. It uses the latest 232-layer NAND flash and has 700TBW per 1TB of capacity.

You also get a separate heatsink, which you can apply if your motherboard doesn’t already have metal heatsinks. Fanxiang says this drive comes with a five-year warranty and has its own factory and service team in case something goes wrong.

What you need to know about the best PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs in 2024

The Crucial T700 Gen5 NVMe SSD is my recommendation for anyone buying a PCIe 5.0 SSD today. It has almost the fastest speeds available, at 11,700 MB/s sequential read, which is unsurprising since every other PCIe Gen5 manufacturer uses Micron’s 232-layer TLC NAND to make its SSDs. Keeping things in-house means Crucial could get more performance from the SSD controller. This is the drive to beat, and it only costs a few dollars more than the cheapest options. The other important factor is that this is the only drive offering a 4TB capacity. To some, that might be the only factor that matters.

That said, getting Crucial’s T700 with a heatsink costs more, so value-orientated shoppers will want to look at other options, such as Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen5 12000. This drive has slightly slower speeds, but you probably won’t notice that in everyday use, and the heatsink it comes with appears to dissipate the SSD's 11W power usage easily.

This is just the second round of releases for PCIe 5.0 SSDs, with over a dozen new models in the works from the usual suspects. The next round of releases will bring 14,000MB/s speeds or above, and we look forward to testing those, as we have no doubt that at least some will end up as our favorite SSDs from overall performance alone.

FAQ

Q: Is a PCIe 5.0 SSD overkill?

This depends. A PCIE 5.0 drive isn't technically overkill for desktop PCs with modern data demands and computing power. Even a PC from a few years back may have PCIe 5.0 support and you could use the available bandwidth. Building a PC for the future will often require a PCIe 5.0 SSD as this will provide the best performance as these storage demands continue to increase.

Q: How much should you spend on a PCIe 5.0 SSD?

PCIe 5.0 SSDs may not come in all shapes, but they absolutely come in all different sizes. Ranging from 250GB to 4TB, you can expect to pay a premium for high-capacity drives. Depending on what you require the drive to do, the price will vary. An OS drive only needs to be 250GB at the most, which can handle the main system and some home directories. A second drive can be installed for games and other data, which could be more pricey if PCIe 5.0.