Testing The First PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSD On Linux Has Been Disappointing

This past week saw the first two consumer PCIe 5.0 NVMe solid-state drives released to retail: the Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 10000 and the Inland TD510. I've been testing the Inland TD510 2TB Gen 5 NVMe SSD the past few days. While in simple I/O testing it can hit speeds almost up to 10,000 MB/s reads and writes, for more complex workloads it quickly dropped against popular PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe SSD options. In my testing thus far of this first consumer Gen5 NVMe SSD it's left me far from impressed.

The Inland TD510 2TB SSD features 3D TLC NAND flash, makes use of a Phison E26 controller, and is rated for sequential reads up to 10,000 MB/s, writes up to 9,500 MB/s, 4K random reads up to 1,500,000 IOPS, and 4K random writes up to 1,250,000 IOPS.

The Inland TD510 has an endurance rating of 1400 TBW and an MTBF rating of 1,600,000 hours while being backed by a six year limited warranty.

For those wondering, Inland only mentions Microsoft Windows 8 / 10 / 11 support. There are no mentions of Linux support or for other alternative operating systems even though this is just an NVMe solid-state drive.

For keeping this PCIe Gen 5 SSD cool, Inland ships the solid-state drive with an integrated heatsink with active fan. Given the small size of the fan, it does get a bit noisy. It's not too extremely annoying but given the pitch from this small fan it's easy to notice the difference of it being installed in a desktop system if used to the other fan noise of your system(s). The fan noise isn't a deal breaker for me as much as some of the less than stellar performance results, but these Gen5 NVMe SSDs do certainly need adequate cooling. Some thermal results later in this article.

The Inland TD510 has a list price of $399 USD but is currently retailing this week for $349 USD. That's still pricey compared to popular PCIe 4.0 2TB NVMe options but hopefully with time as additional PCIe Gen5 SSDs get released, we'll see prices quickly drop.