Ahead of CES in January, Adata announced its upcoming PCIe Gen 5 SSD (opens in new tab). The 'big news' was a claimed throughput of a full 14 GB/second. And there was much rejoicing. Well, sort of.

Inevitably, Adata withheld most of the further details about the new drive, stating only that it uses a "patented heat dissipation design."

What we don't know, but really want to understand, is how this new SSD stacks up with respect to 4K random access, on which IOPS performance depends. Without a doubt, the best PCIe Gen 4 drives (open in new tab) provide ample peak throughput, at about 7.3GB/s read and 7GB/s write.

However, these drives are limited to less than 100 MB/s on 4K single queue depth reads and 300 MB/s on writes. It is these numbers that we believe need improvement. In other words, 14GB/sec (which Adata has not stated, but we assume is a read) is great. But what about 4K numbers?

In July, Adata announced a prototype Gen 5 drive that claims 1.8M read and 1.6M write IOPS using a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller chip, which is roughly 30-50% better than the fastest Gen 4 drives.

If this translates into final retail drives, it would be a good start.

We had hoped that PCIe 5.0 SSDs would arrive last month, as was the initial noise from AMD and its supporting motherboards, but that Gen 5 launch window is long closed (open in new tab) and getting good 14GB/s capable NAND is Rumors of difficulties are holding us back.

We'll see how long it takes for that faster memory to make its way into our SSDs when they are released next year.