New PCIe 6 SSD Controller Enables 28GB/s Sustained Read and 7,000K IOPS

American-Taiwanese NAND flash controller company Silicon Motion has debuted its next-generation PCI Express 6.0 controller, the SM8466. This controller will enable faster-than-ever storage devices at up to 28GB/s—close to double the sustained read and write speeds of the latest PCIe 5 SSDs (and more than Micron managed in March). Supporting drives aren't expected to be available to consumers for at least another year, and no motherboards support it anyway. But for data centers and servers, this could open the door for some big performance improvements.

The latest generation consumer SSDs use the PCIe 5 interface, and the fastest of those can offer sustained read and write speeds just shy of 15,000MB/s, or 15GB/s. That's crazy fast, but it doesn't result in games loading much faster than PCIe 4 drives that are rated for half that speed. That's because most consumer ...