JULY 2019 PCWorld 91STORAGE
PCIe promises a huge boost in other areas of
the PC, though. The most obvious one is
storage, where AMD also demonstrated the
performance difference using SSDs.
We witnessed a single Gigabyte Aorus M.2
PCIe 4.0 SSD hitting 5GBps reads and 4.3GBps
write speeds. That’s about 35 percent higher
sequential performance than we’ve seen from
some of the faster M.2 PCIe 3.0 SSDs.
It gets even crazier if you run them in RAID
0, which is what Gigabyte did using a PCIe
4.0 add-in card holding four 2TB PCIe 4.0
M.2 SSDs. You can see the card below with
its shroud off. The card is essentially one big
passive PCIe extender.
The performance of that card is
impressive, at 15.4GBps reads and 15.5GBps
writes. Compare that to Intel’s VROC demo
from the Computex 2017 (go.pcworld.com/
dm17), which used eight M.2 x4 PCIe 3.0
drives in RAID 0 on an X299 motherboard.
That hit only 11.6GBps.
A Gigabyte M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD can push 5GBps
reads and 4.3GBps writes, a hefty increase over
PCIe 3.0 drives.CRYSTALDISKMARK 6.0.1 X64
READ (MB/S) WRITE (MB/S)
Seq Q32T1 5014.4 4266
4KiB Q8T8 1812.7 2058.6
4KiB Q32T1 726.1 698.7
4KiB Q1T1 62.31 238.7With four M.2 PCIe 4.0 drives in RAID 0, the AMD-
based Gigabyte Aorus M.2 RAID card can push
15GB each way.CRYSTALDISKMARK 6.0.2 X64
READ (MB/S) WRITE (MB/S)
Seq Q32T1 15385 15509
4KiB Q8T8 2128.3 1826.4
4KiB Q32T1 2056 1742.9
4KiB Q1T1 112.5 143.9RAW BIT RATE LINK BW BW/LANE/WAY TOTAL BW X16
PCIe 1.x 2.5GT/s 2Gb/s 250MB/s 8GB/s
PCIe 2.x 5GT/s 4Gb/s 500MB/s 16GB/s
PCIe 3.x 8GT/s 8Gb/s 1GB/s 32GB/s
PCIe 4.0 16GT/s 16Gb/s 2GB/s 64GB/s
PCIe 5.0 32GT/s 32Gb/s 4GB/s 12GB/sPCIE VERSIONS