There have been CPUs and motherboards that are compatible with one another since the year 2021. Several companies made debut announcements throughout the summer of 2016. As early as the Ryzen 7000 announcement, AMD promised that consumers may purchase a finished product by November 2022. However, really mind-blowing PCIe 5 SSDs have not yet made their debut.

The emphasis on new processors and portable computers was a major theme at CES 2023. A wide selection of PCIe 5 SSDs was not shown, thus those expectations were dashed. Many companies that have made public statements in the past have gone quiet.

However, towards the end of this lengthy and twisting route, you may be able to see the bright city lights. Indications of imminent debuts have been provided by CES 2023. Two PCI Express 5 solid-state drives (SSDs) from MSI are on exhibit at the company’s stand (you can see them for yourself in Tom’s Hardware’s article) with a second-quarter release window projected for them. Read and write speeds of 10GB/s are possible with MSI’s Spatium 570, while 12GB/s and 10GB/s are possible with the Spatium 570 Pro, respectively.

Phison, the firm responsible for the SSD controller chips used throughout the industry, has released a PCIe 5 SSD engineering sample to demonstrate the capabilities of its new E26 controller. When compared to its predecessor, Gen 4 technology, it may increase bandwidth by 200% and reduce latency by 30%. At the conference, Phison is also demonstrating their enterprise controller, which offers sequential read/write rates of more than 14GB/s.

Phison’s collaborations with companies like MSI, Corsair, Gigabyte, and Sabrent suggest that we may soon be in a fully ready condition for PCIe 5 SSDs. Big spenders and those moving large amounts of data will appreciate that improvement. Even while current SSDs are fast enough for gaming and general use, PCIe 5 can’t come soon enough for situations when every second counts.

So maybe it’s reasonable to have some faith restored; the Q2 prediction for those MSI drives could be more solid than earlier assurances. True, but only time will tell.