Corsair Drops A PCIe 4.0 Bandwidth Bomb

Corsair drops a PCIe 4.0 bandwidth bomb.

- Jeremy Laird

Want more bandwidth? Get PCI Express 4.0. If only life were quite that simple. Originally published in 2017, the latest 4.0 revision of the PCI Express interconnect is now coming on stream in actual products. AMD’s new motherboard chipsets for its latest Ryzen 3 CPUs include PCIe 4.0 support, enabling us to get jiggy with supporting devices. Enter our very first PCI Express 4.0 SSD: the new Corsair MP600 in 1TB trim.

The big news with PCI Express 4.0 is, of course, the doubling in bandwidth. Per lane, PCI Express 3.0 delivers 1GB/s. PCI Express 4.0 bumps that up to 2GB/s. Thus an SSD with a quad-lane PCI Express 4.0 interface has 8GB of bandwidth to work with. It wasn’t all that long ago that 8GB/s was a pretty healthy figure for system memory. For storage, it’s pretty epic.