Samsung is readying giant PCIe 6.0 SSDs for production

They say the wheels of industry never stop turning, and it seems that’s true even when the chassis on top has fallen off, because as current-gen SSD prices continue to climb, the next generation is already being spun up. According to ZDNet Korea’s sources, Samsung is “embarking on full-scale preparations” for PCIe 6.0 SSDs, with the first orders being for R&D and mass production orders only expected in the second half of the year.

I suppose that’s me looking at it from a consumer perspective, though, because Samsung is hardly going to be viewing the current demand-induced supercycle as the car falling off its wheels. Rather, for Samsung—as with all memory and storage makers—current high prices and extra demand is very welcome fuel for a growing fire. AI, which is fuelling the demand, really is “making memory sexy again”, as Micron told us almost two years ago. And ditto storage, it seems.

Not that it would be worth spending the inordinate amount of money a bleeding-edge drive would surely cost anyway, even if it was a reasonably sized one for gaming. PCIe 4.0 drives are still perfectly fine for gaming, even now Gen 5 drives are finally worth considering alongside Gen 4 ones. The random read/write performance gains between SSD generations simply don’t justify spending a bunch extra on the latest and greatest tech.

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This won’t be the first PCIe 6.0 drive out in the wild, either. We saw Micron launch one last July, three years after the Gen 6 standard was finalised. That one is for AI servers, too. AI, eh? It comes for us all.

At least it’s not come for our gaming drives just yet… oh, wait. Yeah, scratch that, it’s coming for us all. Let’s hope those datacentres move over to Gen 6 before too long and leave some Gen 4 and 5 scraps for the rest of us.