Amazing performance; great article Hilbert.

While the theoretical performance shows a bigger number than Gen 4 drives, does that bigger number actually equate to a noticeable or even tangible improvement in games or applications? Considering the price and inconvenience of the cooling solutions for many Gen 5 drives, are they actually worth bothering with and where does the technology go from here, active cooling for Gen 6? Watercooling for Gen 7?

As answered in the review, not at this time in my believe, the differences will be marginal (but incremental). And incremental performance increases do matter, a few years ago we were running 2.5" SATA3 SSDs. With the current gen NVMe SSDs you can certainly notice a proper difference, albeit an older SATA3 SSD still will get you there 90% of the time thanks to fast access time. So you're fine with a proper Gen 3 or 4 NVMe SSD. I am more curious about other controllers, as Phison E26 specifically runs so hot. The solve is at hand though, fabrication on a smaller node requiring less voltage in that controller.

Every time I see such a cooler on an nvme ...it is instant nope for me ! But thankfully eventually we will get pcie5 drives with just a small heat spreader or nothing !

Look like there is a case for Sata 4. I doubt it will ever happen though. PCI-E ribbon to nvme whos got one? 😉