The first Solid State drive with an extremely fast PCIe 6.0 interface

The PCI Special Interest Group (SIG) has announced some time ago that it has finished defining the specifications for the next generation PCIe interface. Here it was PCIe 6.0, which is up to twice as fast as the previous 5.0. It will allow Solid State drives, graphics cards and other components of personal computers and servers to transfer data up to 256 GB/s.

Micron has proven this by preparing the first Solid State drive with a PCIe 6.0 interface. The novelty should be able to read data at a speed of up to 26 GB/s without any problems. The speed of classic Solid State drives with PCIe 5.0 interfaces is only around 14.5 GB/s. In practice, this means that the speed of PCs with a Solid State PCIe 6.0 drive will be noticeably faster.

The new PCIe 6.0 interface will undoubtedly double the throughput, but this is increased by switching to PAM-4 encoding from NRZ instead of increasing the frequency, so the range/distance requirements remain roughly the same. However, PAM-4 coding is more error-sensitive, so the error rate increased despite the addition of forward error correction (FEC). While the bandwidth has doubled, the error rate has also increased, reducing the effective bandwidth.

How Micron's first Solid State drive with a PCIe 6.0 interface will perform in practice will have to wait a little longer. This will be officially presented as part of the FMS 2024 conference in August. The novelty could be offered for sale towards the end of this year.