I recently bought a Crucial T705 SSD and I'm wondering if PCIe 5.0 drives are just a marketing gimmick. I've noticed that the random read and write speeds are worse than my two-year-old Samsung 990 Pro, which I thought was strange since those metrics really matter for everyday usage. Is it possible I've misconfigured the drive but still got the expected sequential performance?
3 Answers
It really depends on your motherboard specs. Do you have 4 lanes of PCIe 5.0 available for your storage? If you don't, that could definitely impact your speeds. Also, most people won’t notice a difference in gaming. PCIe 5.0 SSDs aren’t really necessary for gaming workloads at this stage.
You're right on point. For regular NAND SSDs, the random I/O performance hasn't improved much. Most users won't notice a significant difference between a good SATA SSD and a PCIe 5.0 drive in day-to-day tasks. The Optane drives used to have better random performance, but they were discontinued mainly because they couldn't keep costs low enough.
Honestly, unless you're working with massive files—like video editing or similar tasks—PCIe 5.0 SSDs are largely overkill. For general use, you probably won't see much of a difference.
That's kind of what I thought; I just wanted to make sure.
I have the TUF GAMING X670E-PLUS, so I think I'm good there.