Samsung is prepping PCIe 6.0 SSDs already but don't expect to get your hands on them without screw-you AI datacentre money

They say the wheels of industry never stop turning, and it seems that's true even when the chassis on top has fallen off, because as current-gen SSD prices continue to climb, the next generation is already being spun up. According to ZDNet Korea's sources, Samsung is "embarking on full-scale preparations" for PCIe 6.0 SSDs, with the first orders being for R&D and mass production orders only expected in the second half of the year.

I suppose that's me looking at it from a consumer perspective, though, because Samsung is hardly going to be viewing the current demand-induced supercycle as the car falling off its wheels. Rather, for Samsung—as with all memory and storage makers—current high prices and extra demand is very welcome fuel for a growing fire. AI, which is fuelling the demand, really is "making memory sexy again", as Micron told us almost two years ago. And ditto storage, it seems.

None of that seems to have affected next-gen production timelines, though, because Samsung's plan to start making these drives in 2026 isn't new. It showed off its first PCIe 6.0 drive, the PM1763, last summer at the Future of Memory and Storage summit, where it was awarded Best of Show for the Most Innovative Memory Technology.

That's an enterprise and datacentre SSD, by the way, so don't expect to be getting it in your gaming PC. It's a 256 TB drive, which is mighty alluring but probably just a little out of budget for a home PC. A 512 TB version is planned for 2027.

Not that it would be worth spending the inordinate amount of money a bleeding-edge drive would surely cost anyway, even if it was a reasonably sized one for gaming. PCIe 4.0 drives are still perfectly fine for gaming, even now Gen 5 drives are finally worth considering alongside Gen 4 ones. The random read/write performance gains between SSD generations simply don't justify spending a bunch extra on the latest and greatest tech.

This won't be the first PCIe 6.0 drive out in the wild, either. We saw Micron launch one last July, three years after the Gen 6 standard was finalised. That one is for AI servers, too. AI, eh? It comes for us all.

At least it's not come for our gaming drives just yet... oh, wait. Yeah, scratch that, it's coming for us all. Let's hope those datacentres move over to Gen 6 before too long and leave some Gen 4 and 5 scraps for the rest of us.