Best Storage Drives From CES 2020 – The Push to PCIe Gen4 SSDs

By Nathan Kirsch

ASUS and Gigabyte Show Off PCIe Gen4 AICs

Hyper M.2 X16 Gen 4 Card Shows up

ASUS introduced their Hyper M.2 X16 Gen 4 Card at CES 2020. This card is currently aimed at those running AMDs 3rd generation Ryzen Threadripper processors on a motherboard powered by the TRX40 chipset. This PCI Express 4.0 x16 card has four M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 slots under an actively cooled heat spreader. A PCIe 4.0 x16 slot can theoretically hit approximately 32 gigabytes per second (GB/s) of bandwidth and this card

ASUS Hyper M.2 PCIe Gen4 Add-In-Card
ASUS Hyper M.2 PCIe Gen4 x16 Add-In-Card

Each of the M.2 slots on the card support M.2 2242, 2260, 2280, and 22110 SSDs, so you have plenty of flexibility of when it comes to what drives you want to populate it with. A PCIe 4.0 x16 slot can theoretically hit speeds of up to 32 GB/s (256Gbps), so this card is capable of doing some amazing things. It is also ready for power hungry high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs as each slots is capable of providing 14 Watts of power. With up to 56 Watts of SSDs possibly being powered by this AIC the cooling fan should now make sense.

ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 Gen 4 card
ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 Gen 4 card back

Gigabyte AORUS Gen4 AIC Adaptor GC-4XM2G4

Gigabyte on the other-hand was showing off the AORUS RAID SSD AIC adapter GC-4XM2G4 at CES 2020. This PCIe 4 x16 card also supports four PCIe 4.0 drives and is actively cooled. Unpopulated it runs $149.99 at places like Newegg.

Gigabyte AORUS RAID SSD
Gigabyte AORUS RAID SSD

Gigabyte had the card up and running in their CES 2020 suite with four Gigabyte AORUS NVMe Gen4 M.2 drives running RAID0 in a stunning demo system.

GC-4XM2G4

Want to guess how fast that RAID array was on a 3rd Generation AMD Ryzen Threadripper platform?

GC-4XM2G4 Performance at CES 2020

How does 19,031 MB/s read and 15,580 MB/s write sound for sequential read/write performance in CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2? Gigabyte has broken the 19 GB/s mark, which is stunning.