MSI shows PCIe Gen5 M.2 Expander-Z card for next-gen SSD, up to 128Gb / s

There are still months until we see a SSD PCI-Express Gen 5.0, but MSI is ready to tell us more about upcoming products. One such product is an expansion card for M.2 SSD.

The M.2 Expander-Z is an add-in card to be installed in a PCIe slot. It serves as a bridge between the M.2 connector and the PCIe Gen5 slot. What’s important to note here is that the only platform that supports this standard is the Intel 12th Gen Core series. Even more important, the use of this card will automatically reduce the available lanes for graphics cards, since Alder Lake CPUs only have 16 PCIe Gen5 lanes, although with 8 lanes left over for a graphics card, this depends on what the user wants. At this time, this is not a problem because there are no Gen5 GPUs, and the differences between Gen5 and Gen4 GPUs should be minimal, however, we anticipate that GPU manufacturers will start releasing Gen5-compatible GPUs from January next. year being the RTX 3090 Ti the first to have it.

MSI promises a bandwidth of up to 128 Gb / s, but this is only the maximum speed of the PCIe connector. Companies like Phison revealed that they are preparing controllers to handle a transfer speed of up to 14 Gb / s, twice what Gen4 is capable of.

Gen5 storage will require as you will see an active or passive cooling. The Expander-Z Gen5 has a giant heatsink for the M.2 SSD that can accommodate only ONE, because of the size we think it could be at least two or three … It also has a fan, which can be turned off. Power consumption should also increase, but the exact numbers are not entirely clear yet.

MSI has not confirmed when the Gen5 Expander will be available. But these expansion cards are usually added to the GODLIKE motherboard series. The Z690 version of this motherboard has yet to be shown and the release date is still unknown.