Gigabyte’s newest SSD has a heatsink with its own zip code

Okay, that title is a very slight exaggeration. But look at this thing! The included heatsink on the Aorus Gen5 1000 SSD looks like it might just crush the poor M.2 drive underneath its massive tread, like a sumo wrestler trying to ride a miniature pony. According to Gigabyte’s announcement, the gigantic add-on is included separately in the packaging, allowing the user to install the SSD with or without the add-on. That’s handy, especially since it simply won’t fit in the M.2 slot placement of many motherboards.

But if you’re shelling out for this drive, you want the heatsink, in order to hit its maximum rated speed of 10 gigabytes read/write per second. That’s assuming, of course, that you have a motherboard with a PCIe 5.0 slot capable of utilizing the latest NVMe storage. Gigabyte says that the speed breakthrough is 40 percent faster than the previous generation of the design (which also came with a bombastic cooler) enabled by 200 layers of 3D NAND flash.

Gigabyte

That’s on the 2B version. The 1TB model is rated slightly lower at “just” 9500/8500 MB/s according to Guru3D. Gigabyte isn’t saying when you’ll be able to buy the Aorus Gen5 1000, but presumably it’ll be sometime in the upcoming months. Based on the price of other early PCIe Gen5-enabled drives, expect to pay somewhere between “a lot” and “a whole lot.”