If an M.2 SSD that reads at 3,500 MBps seems a little slow to you, Adata has good news. Here at CES 2020, the company unveiled the XPG Sage, an upcoming PCIe Gen 4 SSD that promises read and write speeds of over 7,000 and 6,000 MBps, along with 1 million / 800K IOPS read and writes. Due out later this year for an undetermined price, the Sage is among the first to use Innogrit's Rainier controller.
At its CES suite, Adata showed some preliminary CrystalDisk results from the Sage. The demo unit managed sequential read and writes of 7,240 and 5,395 MBps respectively. However, an Adata product manager said he expects the write rate to increase to over 6,000 MBps by the time the firmware is finalized.
The Innogrit Rainier (IG5236) controller promises significant speed and IOPS improvements over the Phison E16, the controller found in all the current-gen PCIe 4.0 SSDs. The Corsair MP600, which uses the E16 controller, is rated for read / writes of 4,950 / 4,250 MBps, about 25 percent less than the Rainier-powered XPG Sage. Additionally Corsair's SSD is rated for only 680,000 / 600,000 IOPS, 30 to 40 percent less than the Sage's 1 million / 800,000 read / write IOPS.
Innogrit is a new name in the SSD controller space, but the specs on its Rainier IG5236 are impressive. It uses 8 channels, with a 16 / 12nm TSMC FinFET manufacturing process, and can support up to 16TB of storage. The Sage itself will be available in capacities of up to 4TB.
An Adata representative said that the Sage has a full 4GB of DRAM cache. As part of the XPG gaming line, it will have an attractive heatspreader, but the company didn't have one to show us just yet.
Given the fluctuation in NAND prices, Adata could not share target pricing. A rep did say that we should expect to see the Sage sometime later this year, perhaps around the Computex (May / June) time frame.
