You don’t need a PCIe 5.0 SSD unless you say ‘Yes’ to these 3 questions

There’s a common misconception about PCIe 5.0 SSDs that since they’re the latest-generation SSD storage and boast faster speed and bandwidth compared to PCIe 4.0 SSD, anyone who gets one is going to experience a big uptick in PC performance.

That’s certainly not the case as we’ve shown by analyzing things like gaming performance. But there are a few exceptions to that rule. In fact, if any of the below statements are true for you, you may well have a justifiable reason for splurging out on a costly PCIe 5.0 SSD upgrade.

Am I working with large datasets?

Scientists and other professionals work with very large amounts of data — often terabytes but sometimes even petabytes in size.

PCIe 5.0 SSD doubles the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 SSD delivering theoretical speeds of 14,000MB/s for reads and 12,000MB/s for writes to disk. These faster transfer speeds can help prevent one of the biggest problems data scientists have to deal with nowadays — that is, the bottlenecks that occur on their PCs loading and preprocessing data from storage.

For data scientists, especially those working with datasets in Large Language Models (LLMs), tasks like running complex queries on a database, accessing files while training models, or saving large model checkpoints should be much snappier with a PCIe 5.0 SSD, therefore reducing the time workers are idle and likely therefore also boosting productivity.

Am I a video editor, 3D animator, or designer working with very large files?

If your job title is 3D animator, designer, or video editor and, again, you’re working with large files, then a PCIe 5.0 SSD is likely to make your workflow much quicker.

That’s especially the case if you work with 4K or even 8K video files, where the speed and bandwidth increases will likely translate to smoother timeline scrubbing and faster rendering.

Do I want to future-proof my hardware for gaming?

Right now, there’s not much of an advantage gaming with a PCIe 5.0 SSD over a PCIe 4.0 SSD, but as hardware and software applications continue to evolve, it’s likely they will better take advantage of the speed and bandwidth benefits of PCIe 5.0 SSD for gaming.

That looks to be the case with the emerging technology of DirectStorage that reduces load times and improves asset streaming in games, especially data-heavy open-world RPGs.

DirectStorage allows games to load data directly from the SSD to the GPU, thereby bypassing the CPU. While the technology works on PCIe 4.0 SSDs, PCIe 5.0 SSDs are better suited to utilize the DirectStorage technology when it becomes more widespread.

Author: Dominic Bayley, Australian Editor, PCWorld