Hard drive speeds haven't improved significantly for years, but solid state drives continue to get faster, and Lexar just gave us a glimpse of what to expect from the next generation of SSDs.

As Wccftech reports, Lexar is testing a new SSD which takes adavantage of a PCI Express 4.0 connection. The result is a drive capable of achieving read speeds of up to 7GB/s and write speeds of over 4GB/s.

Although only a test, Lexar is confident those speeds will be attained when the new SSD ships. Currently the prototype is managing to hit 6,224MB/s reads and 4,246MB/s writes, which should hopefully get closer to the 7GB/s mark as the design is finalized. Of course, you're going to have to upgrade other parts of your system to take full advantage of the speed on offer.

Currently, motherboards and laptops typically ship with PCIe 3.0 M.2 ports, which a PCIe 4.0 SSD can be slotted into, but won't achieve full speed. Another limitation right now is processor support, with only AMD's Ryzen processors able to take full advantage of the drives. However, this is surely set to change next year as new motherboards and laptops appear. Support from Intel is also sure to appear.

For now, Lexar doesn't have a name for the new drive and the release date is simply set as "2020." If you're in the makret for a new NVMe SSD then there's little point waiting for these new drives to appear. There's already PCIe 4.0 SSDs available offering 5GB/s read speeds, however, they carry a premium price and the existing PCIe 3.0 SSDs with 2GB/s read speeds are more than enough for your home computing needs. For now, the PCIe 4.0 drives are best suited to data centers.

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