THE SSD to the PCI Express 5.0 standard is about to arrive on the market and ASRock intends to satisfy lovers of crazy solutions.
No, although we’ve been talking about it for a while now, there’s still no question of testing an NVMe SSD in PCI Express 5.0. However, technology is inspiring more and more manufacturers, as this card shows.
Maximize PCIe 5.0
ASRock has indeed just announced the release of a rather special kind of PCI Express expansion card. The Blazing Quad M.2 Card is designed to accommodate up to 4 SSDs for ultra-fast storage.
Indeed, this expansion card takes advantage of its PCI Express 5.0 x16 slot to be compatible with the latest generation SSDs: it is possible to add NVMe SSDs to PCIe Gen 5 for record speeds.
Actual performance will of course depend on the SSDs actually installed by the user, but ASRock highlights the possibility of exploiting the new standard to the fullest with ” up to 16 GB/s bandwidth “.
Wide compatibility of 22xx and 25xx SSDs
Such cards already exist from ASRock, Gigabyte, MSI, but this new model is the first to support PCIe 5.0. To do this, the card is very slightly larger than the previous version: it measures 24.4 centimeters long and 12.6 wide.
The four M.2 slots are angled almost 45 degrees and can accommodate SSDs in 2242, 2260, 2280, 2580, 22110, and 25110 where the first number is the SSD’s width and the second is its length. Note that the SSD can be single or double-sided, ASRock having placed a heat dissipation strip on the PCB for each M.2.
On the other side, cooling is provided by an imposing metal plate on which two small fans have been placed. Finally, the power supply for all these little people goes through a 6-pin connector, because the 75 Watts of the PCIe port might not be enough.
Planned to be distributed with the ASRock W790 WS motherboard for the new Intel Xeons, the Blazing Quad M.2 Card will also be sold individually. However, we do not yet know its release date or its price.
Source : ASRock, Videocardz
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