Three things separate one PCIe 5.0 drive from another, and the sequential number on the box is the least useful of them. The first is the controller: the earliest Gen 5 designs hit their figures at a power draw that demanded a fan, while the current 6nm-class silicon reaches comparable throughput at markedly lower power, and a newer cache-free variant now gets close again without onboard DRAM. The second is the memory layout, because more packages working in parallel is what holds a write rate up once the fast cache has been used. The third is the slot you put it in.
That last point catches most upgrades. On the majority of consumer boards only the M.2 slot wired directly to the processor runs at PCIe 5.0; the rest sit behind the chipset at Gen 4. Populating the fast slot can also drop the graphics card from sixteen lanes to eight on some designs, which the manual will state and the box will not. A drive dropped into a Gen 4 slot works perfectly and simply negotiates down, so the money is what gets wasted rather than the hardware.
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Choosing a PCIe 5.0 Drive Instead of a Headline Number
Look for the slot labelled as CPU-attached in your motherboard manual, usually the one nearest the processor socket. That is the only one on most boards carrying PCIe 5.0 lanes. On several designs it shares its lanes with the primary graphics slot, so filling it halves the link to the card. Nothing about this is visible from the outside of the board.
The first wave of PCIe 5.0 controllers ran hot enough that many drives shipped with their own fan. Later controllers built on a finer process reach similar throughput at roughly a third less power, which is why newer drives sit under a plain finned heatsink and stay quiet. Identifying the controller tells you more about noise and clearance than any speed figure does.
Fourteen thousand megabytes a second is a large-file transfer rate measured at high queue depth. Launching an application or loading a level is mostly small scattered reads at low queue depth, where the gap between a good Gen 4 drive and a Gen 5 one narrows to something you would struggle to notice without a timer.
Drives absorb incoming data into a fast pseudo-cache carved out of the flash, then fall back to the native write speed of the memory when it is exhausted. On a large capacity that cache is generous and most jobs never reach the edge of it. On a 1TB model a sustained multi-hundred-gigabyte copy will find it, and the second half of the transfer runs at a fraction of the first.
A PlayStation 5 expansion slot is PCIe 4.0, so the console cannot use the extra bandwidth and the drive's cooler may not even fit the bay. Most laptops are Gen 4 or have storage soldered down. Small-form-factor desktops are a judgement call, since the extra heat has nowhere to go and the airflow around an M.2 slot there is usually poor.