Ostensibly, PNY has just announced its fastest consumer SSD, and in terms of rated performance, it is the pinnacle of gaming SSDs. Its new XLR8 CS3140 is a rather boring name for such a fast drive, but Ghost Tree is already in use and advertises sequential read speeds up to 7,500 MB/s and sequential write speeds up to 6,850 MB/s.

This is an M.2 form factor drive with an NVMe Gen 4 (or x4) interface. This means that it sends data over the PCI Express 4.0 bus for incredibly fast data transfers. This is an incredible jump over even earlier PCIe 4.0 models, which debuted with speeds of up to 5,000 MB/s. And for reference, the fastest SATA SSDs are around 550-580 MB/sec. [So far, the PCIe 4.0 x4 bus to which today's M.2 slots are connected has the bandwidth needed to accommodate increasingly faster drives. But not for long: the theoretical upper limit for PCIe 4.0 x4 is 8,000 MB/s (or 8 GB/s), which is actually a bit less when you factor in the inevitable losses due to overhead

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In other words, there is still room, albeit very little, for other drive manufacturers to overtake PNY. At the moment, however, the XLR8 CS3140 is rated the fastest consumer SSD (single drive) on the market, pushing out Adata's XPG Gammix S70. Here is how it compares:

PNY's class-leading speed metrics apply to the 2TB capacity version. The company also plans to release a 1TB product with the same 7,500MB/sec read performance, but with a slower write speed of 5,650MB/sec.

These evaluation plans are also PNY's own, and the drives will need to be run through their own suite of benchmarks to gauge how close the real thing is.

These drives may or may not come with a huge heatsink. The heatsink weighs 45 grams, is made of aluminum, and has eight vertical fins carved into it to ensure airflow. It is interesting to compare the performance with the heatsink vs. with the drive operating naked. As heat builds up in the controller, the SSD tends to throttle.

PNY has not yet announced pricing for the new drives, but said they will be available at Amazon and Best Buy later this month. The drive will be warranted for five years.