Apacer, Zadak Announce World’s First PCIe Gen 5 M.2 SSD

The first shot in the oncoming war of the PCIe Gen5 SSD war has been claimed by a duo of companies that likely wouldn’t make anyone’s first guess: Zadak and Apacer. Both companies entered a partnership towards developing and launching a PCIe Gen 5 SSD – despite platform support for us PC enthusiasts being available ever since Intel’s launch of its Tiger Lake-based Gen 12 Core design and accompanying Z690 motherboards. Both Apacer and ZADAK have developed their own SKUs surrounding the SSD: AS2280F5 for Apacer, and the TWSG5 for ZADAK.

According to the companies, their respective SSDs can deliver up to 13,000 MB/s sequential read speeds and a scorching 12,000 MB/s sequential writes. Both SSDs are delivered in an M.2 Gen 5 form-factor, with support for the NVMe 2.0 protocol, and yet retain full backwards compatibility with PCIe Gen 4 designs. Both also feature an integrated heatsink design that betrays the SSD’s joint development, as only the stickers change between both models – but ZADAK offers an “ultra thin graphene” heatsink option in addition to the heatsink-cooled model. No word on pricing or availability was available at time of writing.