The link, not the NAND
PCIe 4.0 ×4 is 16 GT/s aggregate, about 7.88 GB/s after 128b/130b encoding. At 7,400 MB/s this drive uses roughly 94% of that. No Gen4 drive is meaningfully faster, because there is nothing left to take. Anyone advertising a large Gen4 speed advantage is quoting cache, not link.
SLC cache, then the wall
3D TLC stores three bits per cell. A portion of the array runs in single-bit SLC mode as a write buffer, and writes land there at full speed. Once it is exhausted, writes fall back to native TLC program speed — a large drop, and it arrives during exactly the workloads that matter: game installs, video ingest, bulk copies. The cache also shrinks as the drive fills, so leave 10–15% free if you write hundreds of gigabytes at a time.
0.5 mm is the feature
A graphene thermal label instead of a finned heatsink. Sony specifies an 11.25 mm total envelope for the PS5 M.2 bay; this stays inside it, fits under motherboard M.2 shields, and fits laptops. A Gen5-style machined heatsink does none of the three.
What we do not claim
The supplier documentation does not state the controller part number or whether a DRAM buffer is fitted. The specification table says so plainly rather than guessing. A DRAM-less design keeps its mapping table in host memory over HMB, which is fine for QD1 reads and weaker for sustained random writes — but we are not going to tell you which one you are getting until we have looked.
QD1 random read is what you feel
Application launches and game loads are dominated by low-queue-depth 4K random reads, not sequential throughput. That is why a 7,400 MB/s drive and a 10,000 MB/s drive feel nearly identical in Windows, while either feels transformative against SATA.
In a Gen3 slot
It links down and tops out near 3,500 MB/s. Not a fault — that is the Gen3 ×4 ceiling. Check what your slot is before assuming the drive is underperforming.
