GALAX HOF Extreme 50 PCIe Gen5 SSD With Active Cooling Hits Retail For $350 US In 2 TB Flavor

GALAX has just announced the retail availability of its fastest SSD within the HOF family, the HOF Extreme 50 PCIe Gen5 with 2 TB capacity.

The GALAX HOF Extreme 50 SSD is a super fast Gen5 SSD with a bulky heatsink and an active-cooling solution. The SSD will come in two flavors, a 1 TB variant with Read and Write speeds of 9500 MB/s (1,300,000 IOPS) and 8500 MB/s (1,100,000 IOPS) while the 2 TB variant will have Read and Write speeds rated at 10,000 MB/s (1,500,000 IOPS) and 9500 MB/s (1,250,000 IOPS).

For today's launch, GALAX has announced the retail availability of the 2 TB HOF Extreme 50 SSD which is available at the Chinese retail outlet, JD.com, for 2499 RMB which converts to $362 US. I managed to confirm with GALAX that the US retail pricing for the SSD will be $349.99 US for the specific capacity.

In terms of performance, the GALAX HOF Extreme 50 PCIe Gen 5 NVMe M.2 SSD will make use of a Phison PS5026-E26 controller based on a TSMC 12nm process and a 232-layer 3D TLC NAND Flash memory. Some of the main features of the new SSD will include support for the GALAX Magic Disk Xtreme Tuner with SMART self-check, storage optimization, firmware updates, secure erase, temperature monitor, and a list of other functions.

In addition to the hardware and performance metrics, the GALAX HOF Extreme 50 PCIe Gen 5 SSD is also going to utilize a new active cooling solution. GALAX has stated that with Gen 5.0, the heat output of storage devices has increased substantially, & as such, standard heatsinks are not good enough for cooling purposes. As such, they have devised a new cooling solution that will ensure continuous and efficient SSD operation. With this new solution, the SSD is expected to operate at 40-45C.

Taiwanese retailer PCHome has listed several Gen5 drives at varying prices which you can see in the links below:

Gigabyte AORUS Gen 5 10000 2 TB SSD - 11,990 NTD ($393 US)

MSI Spatium M570 HS 2 TB Gen5 SSD - 10,890 NTD ($357 US)

In our recent review of the first Phison E26 SSDs, we noticed that not only are 2 TB capacities available at the moment but all SSDs cost between $300 to $400 US. The first wave of drives feature 10 GB/s transfer speeds and that is expected to improve in the future. GALAX HOF SSD lineup is also expected to get up to 12 GB/s variants in the future as the high-layer NAND FLASH matures.