The market for faster solid state drives is ripe for expansion as next-generation game consoles and PCs adopt storage architectures that allow developers to take advantage of the potential speed of PCIe 4.0 models. And just in time, Kioxia, formerly known as Toshiba Memory, has announced a new line of PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

Kioxia's new XG7 and XG7-P are the company's first client (not data center) PCIe 4.0 models. compared to the previous generation XG6 series of PCIe 3.0 drives, Kioxia's latest products have twice the sequential read performance, sequential read performance and 1.6 times faster sequential write performance compared to the previous generation XG6 series of PCIe 3.0 drives.

I wish Kioxia would provide specific speed ratings, but instead my calculations put reads at over 6.3GB/s and writes at over 4.6GB/s. The XG7 is available in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB, and the XG7-P in 2TB and 4TB models.

Faster PCIe 4.0 SSDs also exist, such as Samsung's 980 Pro. Similarly, Phison this week announced its PS5018-E18 controller, which supports read and write speeds of up to 7,400 MB/s and 7,000 MB/s, respectively.

That said, 6.3GB/s (or faster) read speeds are incredibly fast. The highest performance SATA model has a top speed of about 580 MB/sec, which, at this time, is still adequate for gaming. However, things could change quickly depending on how developers take advantage of Windows' Microsoft DirectStorage API, which is based on the same Velocity storage architecture as the Xbox Series X/S. More on this another time.

Since Kioxia is targeting OEM system builders and laptop makers, there is no mention of pricing. This means that if OEMs bite, upcoming gaming laptops and pre-assembled desktops could have faster storage than what we are used to.