Chinese SSD manufacturer unveils world's fastest Gen5 SSD: up to 14.9GB/sec

Chinese manufacturer UNIS has just unveiled its new S5 and S5 Ultra Gen5 SSDs, rocking the fastest Gen5 SSD read speeds of up to 14.9GB/sec, beating out the Gen5 SSD competition.

2

UNIS's new S5 family includes the base S5 and S5 Ultra, both falling into the M.2 2280 form factor and PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. They've debuted in China and should reach global markets in the future, especially when they're pushing speeds of up to 14.9GB/sec which beats some of the world's biggest and best SSD makers.

The base model UNIS S5 pushes out up to 14.9GB/sec sequential reads and up to 12.9GB/sec sequential writes, beating out the competition -- Samsung 9100 PRO with 14.8GB/sec and Crutial T705 with 14.5GB/sec -- especially when you consider that UNIS is using an older, unknown 12nm controller and a DRAM-less design.

UNIS upgrades its S5 Ultra to an interesting dual-PCB design with DRAM cache, and an upgraded 6nm controller which the folks at Tom's Hardware believe is the Silicon Motion SM2508, which is found inside of the Micron 4600 Gen5 SSD. The S5 Ultra is a bit confusing as its name implies it's faster (S5 versus S5 Ultra) but the S5 Ultra ia actually slower... 14.2GB/sec sequential writes (down from 14.9GB/sec on the S5) but the 13.4GB/sec sequential writes are higher than the 12.9GB/sec that the regular S5 spits out.

For users that want productivity, content creation, AI workloads (and not so much gaming) then the S5 Ultra with its slower speeds, but inclusion of DRAM cache are going to be a winner. UNIS also ships a 1mm graphene passive heatsink with its S5 family SSDs, which should be hitting Chinese e-tailers soon.

Once they're out in the wild we'll be able to see if those 14.9GB/sec read speeds are indeed real, too.