Nothing You Do Will Be As Fast As This Hard Drive

SSDs are fast as hell and already one of the best upgrades you can make to a PC. If you want even more speed, there’s NVMe drives–which are faster than just about anything you can throw at it, unless you’re editing 12K raw footage or something.

But of course that’s not fast enough. So who wants to transfer files at almost 5,000MB a second?

The understated element from the Computex announcements on Monday was the imminent release of PCI Express 4.0, a new interface for motherboards that doubles the bandwidth, gigatransfer and frequency speeds from PCIe 3.0. In practical terms, that means components connecting over PCIe can send stuff back and forth a lot faster.

PCIe 4.0 was first announced all the way back in 2011, but it’s not until this year that consumers will actually get devices capable of supporting the faster standard. Some motherboards support it now already–Gigabyte released some BIOS updates that enabled PCIe 4.0 support on some of their X470 and B450 AMD motherboards–but it’ll be a default feature from 2019.

The first motherboards with baked in PCIe 4.0 support will ship in July, and so will devices capable of using the faster lanes. That’s where Corsair comes in with their MP600 M.2 SSD, a new NVMe drive designed to support the next generation Ryzen platform (and PCIe 4.0 in general) when it launches in the coming weeks.

NVMe drivers were already fast–even after heavy usage, you can still get read and writes well over 2,000MB/s. But the MP600 M.2 drive? It tops out at 4,950MB/s and 4,250MB/s for its maximum quoted sequential read and sequential write speeds respectively, which is lightyears beyond what any ordinary user would ever need. That said, with one of these drives you know for sure you’ll always getting the first pick in Overwatch and Dota 2.

The MP600 drive will go on sale internationally from next month to coincide with the launch of the third generation Ryzen platform. The latter goes on sale on July 7, although we don’t know what the supply or availability situation will be like locally.