The First PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSD That Was Tested On Linux Has Shown To Be A Disappointment

The Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 10000 and the Inland TD510 were the first two consumer PCIe 5.0 NVMe solid-state drives to be launched to retail this past week. Both of these drives were manufactured by Inland. During the past few days, I have been putting the Inland TD510 2TB Gen 5 NVMe SSD through its paces. Although it can reach speeds of almost up to 10,000 MB/s reads and writes when subjected to simple I/O testing, it immediately lagged below popular PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe SSD choices when subjected to more sophisticated workloads. My experience with this first consumer Gen5 NVMe SSD, which I’ve been evaluating so far, has not impressed me in the least.

The Inland TD510 2TB SSD is equipped with 3D TLC NAND flash, employs a Phison E26 controller, and is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 10,000 MB/s, sequential write speeds of up to 9,500 MB/s, 4K random read speeds of up to 1,500,000 IOPS, and 4K random write speeds of up to 1,250,000 IOPS. Additionally, the SSD is rated for random read and write speeds of up to 1,500,000 and 1,500,000 The Inland TD510 comes with a limited warranty that is good for six years and has an endurance rating of 1,400 TBW. Also, the MTBF rating for this model is 1,600,000 hours.

Those who are curious should know that Inland only mentions support for Microsoft Windows 8, 10, and 11. Even if this is only an NVMe solid-state drive, there is no indication of whether or not it is compatible with Linux or any other alternative operating systems. Inland supplies the solid-state drive with an integrated heatsink that has an active fan built into it so that the PCIe Gen 5 SSD can maintain a cool operating temperature. The fan is rather loud, especially considering its relatively diminutive size. It is not incredibly bothersome, but given the pitch from this small fan, it is simple to detect the difference of it being placed in a desktop system if you are used to the noise of the other fans in your system. Although it is not highly annoying, it is easy to feel the difference (s).

Although the fan noise isn’t as big of a deal breaker for me as some of the less-than-spectacular performance results, these Gen5 NVMe SSDs absolutely require sufficient cooling to function properly. The Inland TD510 has a suggested retail price of $399 USD, but it can be purchased in stores at the discounted price of $349 USD this week. It is still quite pricey in comparison to other popular PCIe 4.0 2TB NVMe choices, but we may anticipate that when more PCIe Gen5 SSDs are produced, the market will respond by driving down prices relatively rapidly.