2025 might be the best time to buy a PCIe 5 SSD

The long-standing advice for PC storage for gamers, workers, and everyone in between has always been, “Just use an SSD.” It didn’t matter too much if you were using a PCIe 3 SSD, a PCIe 4 SSD, or even an older SATA SSD. The on-paper performance advances in the top drives just didn’t deliver the kind of real-world advantages that would make it worth recommending them every time.

But that may be starting to change with a whole new generation of NVMe 2.0 SSDs, which are faster, leaner, and more capable than ever before.

This is an important distinction, too, because while PCIe 5 SSDs have been around for a while, they haven’t yet garnered the interest they deserve, because frankly the value proposition they made wasn’t that impressive. As we move into 2025, however, the latest generation of SSDs from Biwin and other manufacturers could be the best place to install next year’s demanding games and applications for peak performance.

The advantages of NVMe 2.0

Don’t worry, NVMe 2.0 isn’t introducing any new form-factors or slot types, so these new drives are fully compatible with your existing motherboards and can slot right into any available PCIe 5 M.2 slots without any difficulty. They won’t perform like any drives they replace, though, as they include some intriguing new advances that give them a real leg-up on all the drives that came before.

Biwin’s Black Opal X570 Pro offers full support for the NVMe 2.0 protocol, introducing features like zoned namespaces, which lets your operating system and drive better manage data placement within memory cells, boosting performance and increasing available capacity. There are also new NVMe key value commands, which reduce the work the controller has to do in reading data, as well as additional features for improving drive durability.

All of that is combined with a new 6nm controller which supports up to eight flash memory channels at once, for enhanced read and write performance. The X570 Pro comes with up to 4GB of independent DRAM cache and has a sustained read/write speed of 14,000 MBps and 13,000 MBps, respectively, and a random read performance as high as 2000K IOPS. For games and apps that can take full advantage of cutting-edge SSD performance, this is going to be one of the best ways to experience them.

It comes fitted with a graphene heat spreader for light heat dissipation and easy compatibility with a wide range of desktops, laptops, and other devices, and is available in capacities from 1TB up to 4TB.

As with other SSDs, you’ll find the greatest durability with the larger capacity models, as they simply have more memory cells to work with, so can spread the load more evenly. However, thanks to advances in NVMe technology and Biwin’s strict manufacturing standards, the new X570 Pro SSDs offer stellar TBW ratings. You can fill the 2TB drive up to 2,000 times (1,500TBW) before you should see any performance degradation, and up to 4,000 times (3,000TBW) on the 4TB model. That’s far more than you’d see on most consumer devices, and shows just how advanced this next-generation of PCIe 5 SSDs really is.