How storage has evolved since the days when only stateful memories appeared It is accredited on models such as the CORSAIR MP700 PRO PCIe 5.0. And many will still remember the experience of making the leap from mechanical hard drives to the first SATA SSDs (in my case, it was with the Apple Fusion Drive in the iMac). With it, booting the operating system became a virtually instantaneous process, and so did many other common processes.

That was a big leap, as I say, but the limitations of SATA’s set of storage interfaces and protocols, along with the lower performance of SSD memory at the time, left a lot of room for improvement (although, I insist, the improvement over mechanical hard drives was already spectacular). And this, of course, led to the arrival of non-volatile memory Express (Non-Volatile Memory Express), better known by its abbreviation in English, NVMe, which got rid of the SATA interface (with its inherent limitations) to take advantage of the bandwidth and speed provided by PCIe.

So if we compare the performance of SATA SSDs to modern NVMe SSDs, we see a jump as big or even bigger than the one that happened from HDD to SATA SSD. And if this is true, when we say it by considering the PCIe Gen. 4, the most common today, what about PCIe Gen. 5 offerlike these MP700 PROs just announced by CORSAIR, the numbers go up substantially.

The CORSAIR MP700 PRO PCIe 5 x4 family of storage drives is offered with with a capacity of up to four terabytes and to further satisfy the specific needs of each user are available with three different cooling optionsin all cases with the form factor M.2 2280to guarantee full compatibility with the vast majority of current desktop and tower computers.

The performance data of the MP700 PRO speaks for itself, the sequential read and write speed it achieves 12,400 MB/s and 11,800 MB/s, which represents an increase of up to 75% over PCIe 4.0 SSD. When it comes to sequential access operations, random read and write performance of up to 1.5 million reads and 1.6 million write input/output operations per second (IOPS) puts the MP700 PRO well ahead of the best PCIe Gen 4 drives.

Now for those who are interested in the CORSAIR MP700 PRO PCIe 5 x4 but do not yet have compatible equipment, the good news is that It is also fully compatible with motherboards with PCIe Gen. 4so they can buy it now, mount it on their current PCs, and later when they upgrade to a PC with a PCIe Gen. 5, they will be able to move the unit to it without any problems.

When it comes to cooling, as mentioned above, there are three options. The easiest is to decide for memory without its own cooling, entrust this task of cooling the motherboard itself; The second option is to opt for the MP700 PRO model, which integrates a air active cooler; and for those looking for extreme performance, the variant version is the most recommended MP700 PRO Hydro X Serieswhich comes with a pre-assembled water block designed to fit easily into its own cooling circuit.

CORSAIR MP700 PRO PCIe 5 memory sticks are now on sale on the manufacturer’s website and their prices start at 224.99 euros.