Although the PCI Express 7.0 standard is already a reality, most home users are just starting to use PCI Express 5.0 connectivity. According to industry sources, such as Silicon Motion’s CEO Wallace C. Kuo (in a detailed interview with Tom’s Hardware), PCIe 6.0 SSDs are unlikely to arrive before 2030. This means PCIe 5.0 devices will remain technologically relevant for at least another five years.
Slow Adoption and Practical Challenges
It wasn’t until 2025 that we saw the first consumer graphics products using PCI Express 5.0 connectivity. As with previous technological leaps, the improvements for the average user are not particularly noticeable—at least when using the maximum connectivity, which means using 16 lanes. Some graphics cards do use and benefit from 8 PCIe 5.0 lanes (which is equivalent to 16 lanes of PCIe 4.0), primarily saving costs for manufacturers since modern motherboards already offer PCIe 5.0.
In the case of NVMe SSDs in the M.2 format, PCI Express 5.0 technology was adopted earlier. The first PCIe 5.0 SSDs became commercially available between late 2022 and throughout 2023, offering far better synthetic test results than the previous generation. However, even in 2024, their market presence remains minor due to higher prices and increased heat output, with day-to-day performance gains being hard to notice. It’s worth noting that most SSDs use up to four PCIe 5.0 lanes, which, in practice, equals the bandwidth of 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0.
The Roadblocks to PCIe 6.0 for Consumers
According to Wallace, we won’t see consumer storage products based on PCIe 6.0 until 2030. He states that neither AMD nor Intel is interested in implementing these technologies at present; in fact, they don’t even want to discuss it. The PCI Express 6.0 standard has been available since 2022, but its complexity means it only makes sense for enterprise-level adoption this decade. High production costs and lack of interoperability testing are preventing consumer-oriented products from being considered.
As data transmission rates increase, issues such as signal loss, noise, and impedance shorten the practical length of copper connections, which are still commercially standard. For example, at 16 GT/s (PCIe 4.0), lanes can reach about 28 cm with a signal loss of 28 dB. In contrast, PCIe 6.0 at 64 GT/s experiences a 32 dB loss with less than 9 cm of length.
With these wiring limitations, PCIe 6.0 might be possible in laptops, but is currently unfeasible in ATX desktop motherboards—especially considering the massive graphics cards and the need for extra risers for proper cooling, which further extends cable length.
The solution to these connection length problems lies in the use of retimers, which are expensive but acceptable in corporate environments such as data centers. For the home market, manufacturers still need to find a way to maintain high transfer rates without resorting to such complex and costly components.
Tom’s Hardware notes that the industry will eventually find a solution—the only question is when. For now, Silicon Motion suggests we should expect consumer PCIe 6.0 SSDs by 2030.
