FlumeIO 5901 U.2 SSD review: as good a PCIe 5.0 enterprise drive as you’re going to find

FlumeIO 5901 U.2 SSD: Two-minute review

Mainstream customers looking for fast storage have had a pick of dozens of M.2 PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the market over the last year and a half, but enterprise customers, creative industry professionals, or those who have been looking to upgrade their cloud server storage from older SATA or racks of PCIe 3.0 U.2 drives haven’t been as lucky. 

With U.2 PCIe 5.0 drives only now just starting to make it to market, storage newcomer FlumeIO just might be a godsend with its FlumeIO 5900-series U.2 NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSDs, offering a massive speed upgrade for I/O-heavy devices like network servers at a surprisingly affordable price for an enterprise-grade SSD with this level of performance.

With budgetary pricing starting at $643 for 4TB, and scaling up to $2,059 for 16TB, the FlumeIO 5900-series (comprised of the FlumeIO 5900 and FlumeIO 5901 models, the latter of which I tested for this review), is often cheaper than slower, last-gen drives like the Samsung PM9A3, a Gen 4.0 drive with substantially lower read/write speeds, fewer IOPS, and higher latency.

It goes without saying that this affordability is relative, as customers in enterprise channels are used to paying many thousands of dollars for new drives on a rolling basis as their existing SSD drives near the end of their drive-write lifespan.

But while this drive is almost exclusively for data centers or similar high-throughput, high-volume network devices and systems, there are many creative or engineering and research workstations out there with U.2 compatible motherboards, and this drive might be especially interesting for those in these industries who need both massive storage capacity as well as speed.