Computex 2026 is moving full steam ahead, like an AI train running down a track made of gold-plated DDR5 DIMMs. We’ve moved into the first full day of the trade show, and the announcements are really starting to fill in. You can catch our Day Zero coverage here and keep track of our dedicated Computex 2026 hub.

Arm PC chips are back in focus

Windows on Arm is not new; the first-generation Surface RT launched way back in 2012 with an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. Since then, we’ve seen various other takes on Arm processors running on Windows, from the Surface Pro X with its Microsoft SQ1 SoC to a slew of laptops running Qualcomm’s PC-centric Snapdragon processors.

Now, we’re seeing an even more interest in the segment with Nvidia RTX Spark “Superchip” and the new Snapdragon C from Qualcomm. From all accounts, the RTX Spark targets the high end of the PC market with its 20-core Arm CPU, Blackwell RTX GPU, and 128GB of unified memory.

The Snapdragon C takes a different approach, instead aiming at the budget laptop segment. Laptops using Snapdragon C are expected to be priced as low as $300. However, that price point will be highly dependent on memory pricing, which remains a real pain point not only for OEMs, but also consumers looking to get the most bang for their computing buck. In fact, things have gotten so bad that even Intel has said that "something has to give” with memory prices.

• Nvidia's RTX Spark could capitalize where Qualcomm's Arm-based efforts have not
• Jensen Huang says Nvidia wants to 'reinvent the single most important tool of humanity' with RTX Spark
• Qualcomm aims the Snapdragon C laptop chip at the budget laptop segment, as manufacturers feel the DRAM squeeze
• Intel says 'something has to give' with memory prices

We get hands-on time with Asus’ latest hardware at Computex

Asus always has a large presence at Computex, and this year was no exception. The company had an extensive cast of new characters in the laptop field, with new Vivobooks, Zenbooks, Expertbooks, and Strix Scar gaming laptops. Of the new models introduced, the Zenbook 14 with an Intel processor and 14-inch 2880 x 1800 OLED display caught my attention.

Asus also had a rather cool-looking ROG 20th anniversary Harpe II Extreme Edition wireless mouse and the ROG Azoth Extreme Edition 20 mechanical keyboard. The devices are finished primarily in black, but feature 24-karat gold accents. The keyboard also includes transparent switches and keycaps. And we can’t get past its 3.5-pound heft, thanks to its all-metal chassis.

• Asus shows off updated Zenbook and Strix Scar laptops, along with a TUF-based Gaming desktop
• Hands-on with Asus’ ROG Harpe II Extreme Edition 20 gaming mouse
• Hands-on with Asus’ ROG Azoth Extreme Edition 20 mechanical keyboard

PCIe 6.0 SSDs are on the horizon

A year ago at Computex 2025, we saw prototype PCIe 6.0 SSDs capable of 30+ GB/s speeds. This year, we’re slowly inching towards production-capable hardware, with Phison showing off its latest PCIe 6.0 SSD controller: the X3. The X3 is a 16-channel design that is capable of 28 GB/s sequential read/write speeds and 6.8 million random read/write IOPS.

According to Phison, the controller will begin sampling to customers by the end of 2026, with volume production starting in mid-2027.

• Phison shows PCIe 6.0 X3 SSD controller with 28 GB/s of bandwidth and 6.8 million IOPS, supports 2 petabytes per drive

Everything else

We can’t get into detail on everything we’ve seen so far at Computex in this wrap-up — we’ll let the individual news stories speak for themselves. Here’s everything else we’ve covered for Computex 2026 Day One:

• Noctua announces new thermal pad for AMD chips in partnership with Carbice
• Gigabyte debuts fourth-gen Tandem WOLED and multi-mode Mini LED gaming monitors
• Gigabyte showcases new Infinity products for its 40th anniversary
• Cooler Master shows off new HAF 500 chassis, aluminum fans, and new air coolers
• AMD ‘had to re-engineer’ the Ryzen 7 5800X3D for a re-release

Phison CEO Khein-seng Pua said that some NAND flash manufacturers have increased their prices by as much as 50% overnight, highlighting the severe shortage the industry has been experiencing due to the insane demand by the AI infrastructure build-out. According to Digitimes, the Taiwanese semiconductor company has now started delivering its products directly to cloud service providers (CSPs) and AI hyperscalers, resulting in a 30% revenue share for its enterprise SSD solutions.

Aside from that, it has also started asking its customers for a shorter time frame when it comes to payments, with some clients even asked to pay upfront, because Phison’s own suppliers are doing the same. This shows that the company is pivoting towards the more lucrative enterprise market, with AI tech firms with deep pockets willing to pay a premium just to ensure that they get the memory and storage chips they need to get their data centers running.

To address the uncertainty brought about by these spiraling price increases in both memory and storage costs, the company says it has already signed long-term agreements (LTAs) with six NAND manufacturers and two DRAM suppliers across the globe. The CEO said that these agreements are set in place primarily to secure sufficient supply, implying that cost is not a primary focus. It’s also negotiating for prepaid NAND chips with some suppliers, ensuring that it has priority access to these resources during shortages. In line with this, the value of Phison’s inventory grew from NT$35.6 billion (around US$1.12 billion) to NT$50 billion (around US$1.57 billion) in a matter of months, but the CEO says that it’s still facing challenges when it comes to supply, remarking, "our current concern is that both money and inventory are insufficient."

Aside from this, Phison said that it’s not relying on the lower cost of its existing inventory to drive profit margins on its products, although it does certainly help. But despite the higher prices, demand from cloud and enterprise customers continues to increase, resulting in higher revenues for the company. He also said that the company is continuing with the development of next-generation technologies, including the delivery of PCIe 6.0 samples by August 2026 and continued work on PCIe 7.0 support. However, all of these do not come without cost — the Phison board has already approved a plan to borrow $400 million to $500 million to support all of the work that it plans to do during this time of crisis.

Phison is a key player in the storage world. The company holds roughly 20% of the SSD controller market, 40% of the automotive storage market, and a slice of server SSDs, among other ventures. The unprecedented flash memory shortage is tough enough on Phison, but CEO Khein-Seng Pua (KS Pua) says that it could lead many smaller companies to a quick death this year in an interview with Ning Guan from Era News.

In the talk, he describes a meeting in China where he witnessed mobile and automotive companies (presumably major ones) pleading suppliers for flash memory. He concludes that smaller firms may not be able to secure any flash supply at all, stating that "consumer electronics are finished," and that the market "will see a lot of victims" in the second half of 2026.

Later in the interview he says that he "[tells his clients] that if the first quarter of this year is painful, really painful, then by year-end, they'll definitely jump off a building."

Even in larger markets, Pua expects that smartphones will go undergo a production cut in the range of 100 to 250 million, and that PC and TV shipments are also bound to drop due to supply constraints.

Overall, that's quite the ugly picture, but there seems to be data to support it. Pua says that one of the three major NAND foundries is actually demanding three years' worth of cash prepayments upfront, a notion heretofore unheard of in the industry yet not unbelievable in this time of dire straits. Host Ning Guan even remarks that not even TSMC asked Nvidia, of all companies, for that much of a down payment.

Should even half of the predicted scenario ring true, the consequent flash apocalypse may be as bad or worse than the DRAM crisis. Pua says that 8GB eMMC modules, used across many consumer and automotive segments, rose from $1.50 to $20 last year alone, a 13x increase. Even at those inflated prices, they're still hard to come by, even for the likes of Phison. Pua concedes he and many others are now "memory beggars" and cites that his customers' fulfillment rate is under 30%, revealing an already exhausted market.

If that wasn't enough bad news already, Pua thinks the situation will get worse still, as the demand of the AI market shifts from training (creating the models) to inference, when the models actually run to generate content. The explosion in AI usage requires storage for said content, leaving no flash chips for hardware outside of datacenters.

That news unfortunately dovetails with Western Digital saying it's out of hard drives for the year, and already short for 2027 and 2028. At this rate, we'll be back to computing on abacuses in no time flat unless there's some kind of market correction.

At CES 2026, Phison demonstrated consumer PCs with its aiDAPTIV+ software/hardware combo running AI inference up to ten times faster than without its specialized suite of technologies. When Phison introduced its aiDAPTIV+ technology in mid-2024, it essentially transformed NAND memory into a managed memory tier alongside DRAM to enable large AI models to train or run on systems that did not have enough DDR5 and/or HBM memory, but at the time, it was merely a proof-of-concept aimed at enterprises. By early 2026, the positioning of the technology has changed, and now Phison sees it as an enabler of AI inference models on client PCs, which broadly increases the use-case.

Normally, when tokens no longer fit into the GPU's key-value (KV) cache during inference, older KV entries are evicted, so if/when the model needs those tokens again (in cases of long context or agent loops), the GPU must recompute them from scratch, which makes AI inference inefficient on systems with limited memory capacity. However, with a system equipped with Phison's aiDAPTIV+ stack, tokens that no longer fit into the GPU's KV cache are written to flash and retained for future reuse, which can reduce memory requirements in many cases and dramatically decrease the time to first token, which is the time it takes to produce the first word of a response.

The renewed focus of Phison's aiDAPTIV+ platform is designed to let ordinary PCs with entry-level or even integrated GPUs handle far larger AI models than their installed DRAM would normally permit. Bringing large-model inference and limited training to desktops and notebooks may be valuable for developers and small businesses that cannot afford to make big investments in AI at the moment, so Phison has a list of aiDAPTIV+ testing partners with systems featuring the technology at CES 2026, such as Acer, Asus, Corsair, Emdoor, MSI, and even Nvidia. For example, Acer has managed to run an gpt-oss-120b model on an Acer laptop with just 32GB of memory, which opens doors to a number of applications.

According to Phison's internal testing, aiDAPTIV+ can accelerate inference response times by up to 10 times, as well as reduce power consumption and improve Time to First Token on notebook PCs. Obviously, the larger the model and the longer the context, the higher the gain, so the technology is especially relevant for Mixture of Experts models and agentic AI workloads. Phison claims that a 120-billion-parameter MoE model can be handled with 32 GB of DRAM, compared with roughly 96 GB required by conventional approaches, because inactive parameters are kept in flash rather than resident in main memory.

Given that Phison's aiDAPTIV+ stack involves an AI-aware SSD (or SSDs) based on an advanced controller from Phison, special firmware, and software, the implementation of the technology should be pretty straightforward. This is important for PC makers, value-added resellers, and small businesses interested in using this capability, so it is reasonable to expect a number of them to actually use this technology with their premium models aimed at developers and power users. For Phison, this means usage of their controllers as well as added revenue from selling the aiDAPTIV+ stack to partners.

Phison’s SSD controllers already power many of the world’s best SSDs, and the company is set to extend its industry dominance. The new PS5037-E37T PCIe 5.0 SSD controller delivers blazing speed and remarkable power efficiency—engineered specifically for compact devices like laptops and gaming handhelds.

While Phison’s class-leading PS5028-E28 controller set the benchmark for raw performance, the new E37T takes a different approach by prioritizing exceptional power efficiency and affordability—without sacrificing impressive speeds. Manufactured by TSMC using an advanced 6nm process node, the E37T features a cutting-edge DRAM-less architecture and supports four NAND channels with transfer rates up to 4,800 MT/s. This innovative design enables the E37T to deliver a remarkable 38% performance boost over previous-generation PCIe 5.0 DRAM-less controllers, such as the PS5031-E31T.

The E37T delivers impressive sequential read speeds of up to 14.7 GB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 13 GB/s with an active power below 2.3W. According to Phison, the drive’s random performance is rated at up to 2,000,000 IOPS for both reads and writes. Compared to the flagship E28 controller, the E37T holds its ground in sequential performance: read speeds are only marginally slower, and write speeds are just about 7% lower.

However, the most notable differences appear in random performance, where the E37T registers about 23% lower random read and 33% lower random write speeds. Despite these differences, the E37T’s balanced approach to speed, efficiency, and affordability is what makes it unique.

At CES 2026, Phison delivered a show-stopping demonstration of the E37T prototype in action—surpassing even the company’s own lofty performance claims. The drive achieved blistering sequential read speeds of 14,926.78 MB/s and write speeds of 13,180.21 MB/s, all while maintaining an impressively low power draw of just 2.13W. For added real-world validation, a live CrystalDiskMark benchmark revealed the E37T-powered drive peaking at 4.47W under heavy load.

SSDs powered by the E37T controller will hit the market soon, ushering in a new wave of high-performance, energy-efficient storage options for compact devices. Engineered for versatility, the E37T will be featured in various drive form factors—such as M.2 2280, M.2 2242, and the ultra-compact M.2 2230—making it an ideal solution for everything from slim laptops to portable gaming consoles.

Phison E28 Roars Ahead: Next-Level Performance Gets Epic Capacity Upgrade

While the E37T grabbed headlines at CES 2026, Phison made waves with a major update on its flagship E28 controller. The company announced that next-generation E28-powered 8TB SSDs are right around the corner. With only a handful of consumer PCIe 5.0 8TB SSDs currently available—such as the WD Black SN8100, or should we say the Optimus GX Pro 8100, and Samsung 9100 Pro—Phison is set to seize a wide-open market with its E28-based drives. This move not only reaffirms Phison’s leadership in storage innovation but also promises to redefine what’s possible for high-capacity, high-performance SSDs.

We witnessed the E28 8TB SSD prototype in action—and it lived up to every bit of the hype. The drive shattered expectations, delivering blistering sequential read speeds of 14,919.18 MB/s and write speeds of 14,088.25 MB/s, soaring far beyond Phison’s own official numbers for the controller.

The biggest hurdle facing E28 8TB drives is the global NAND shortage and the insatiable demand created by the AI boom—a factor that’s already driven SSD and memory prices sky-high. As a result, these cutting-edge PCIe 5.0 8TB drives will likely come with a hefty price tag. For now, the E28 8TB SSDs could remain out of reach for most consumers. However, there is hope on the horizon: as the market eventually cools and the AI-driven frenzy subsides, SSD prices will begin to stabilize. When that happens, high-capacity drives like the E28-based 8TB ones will become more accessible, opening up exciting new storage possibilities without the premium price tag.

As an unprecedented DRAM crisis unfolds, artificial intelligence is sowing chaos on another front: storage. Data centers using nearline HDDs are switching to SSDs to avoid lead times, which has led to a supply squeeze for NAND flash memory — one that's set to only worsen as the insatiable appetite for AGI continues to grow. As reported by Digitimes, Phison CEO Khein-Seng Pua confirmed that NAND prices have more than doubled in the past six months and that he expects it to stay this way for a while. In fact, all NAND production capacity has already been sold out for all of 2026.

The same 1 TB TLC chip that cost $4.80 in July of this year now costs $10.70. That might not seem like a big jump in a vacuum, but the ripple effect carries huge consequences when scaled up. The end-consumer looking to build their next PC is who pays for this added cost. For enterprise customers, whom Pua says Phison is prioritizing, their backers can keep pouring in more and more money since the AI boom has created a sort of bulletproof safety net around investments.

Even older MLC memory has seen a doubling in prices, and since last month, this rapid inflation has only accelerated. Pua expects the NAND shortage to last for a few years, especially considering how bearish manufacturers have been when it comes to investing in new facilities. New production lines built to keep up with said demand won't be ready till at least late 2027, according to Phison. Elsewhere, during the company's recent earnings call, he confirmed that "every NAND manufacturer told us 2026 sold out. All the capacity sold out."

Phison posted its year-best numbers in the third quarter of 2025, with NT$18.14 billion (560 million USD) in revenue, up 30% from the year prior. Apart from operating profits, which reduced to 7.9% due to R&D for next-gen memory, every other metric saw a jump across the board. Phison's current inventory stands at NT$1.02 trillion (31.53 billion USD), made up primarily of non-retail markets.

Phison joins SanDisk, which has already raised NAND prices by 50%. Pua said that Phison is deliberately prioritizing its server market over retail consumers due to better margins, with its enterprise SSD business growing to account for up to 30% of all sales. Supply constraints are to become the new norm, with the CEO corroborating high lead times, given the average turnover was already 224 days for Phison up till Q3 2025. Previously, another Digitimes report said that QLC NAND (serving as a replacement for HDDs) is already backordered by 2 years.

The curious case of failing SSDs, following Microsoft’s August security patch for Windows, has once again taken an unexpected turn. According to the Chinese Facebook group PCDIY!, the root cause of the issue stems from pre-release engineering firmware on certain SSDs, which may have been triggered by the Windows 11 updates.

In a Facebook post, group admin Rose Lee said that the issue has been identified and additionally verified by Phison engineers, thereby giving credibility to the claims. Lee explains that testing done by PCDIY! revealed the SSD crashes tied to the Windows 11 update were occurring on drives running pre-release engineering firmware, not the final production version.

Since SSD manufacturers using Phison controllers source them directly from the original supplier and ship them in bulk with mass-production tools, the versions that reach consumers should already run the official firmware. This official firmware has been fully tested and verified, and does not show the anomalies sometimes found in engineering builds.

Last month, it was reported that Microsoft’s August Windows 11 update was causing peculiar SSD failures. Users claimed that their drives were disappearing after heavy file transfers, with some systems unable to recover even after a reboot. In response, Phison issued a statement after conducting over 4,500 hours of testing, claiming it was unable to reproduce the reported failures. The company suggested that thermal issues could be a contributing factor and even recommended that users employ heatsinks to avoid overheating during heavy workloads.

Microsoft later weighed in, firmly denying that its August update was responsible for the storage problems. The company said its investigation showed no connection between the security patch and SSD failures, dismissing the theory that the update had introduced a critical flaw.

With the latest finding by PCDIY! pointing towards pre-release engineering firmware as the likely cause, the story appears to have shifted once again. Essentially, end-users running SSDs with official production firmware should not experience any issues with their storage devices.

Having said that, the back-and-forth between user reports, lab testing by Phison, and Microsoft’s denials highlights how complicated it can be to pinpoint the source of storage failures, particularly when firmware, hardware, and operating system updates overlap.

We highly recommend that users update their SSD firmware if they encounter similar issues. Make sure to back up all important data beforehand, as a precaution.

Last week, Microsoft pushed a Windows 11 update that was reportedly breaking several SSDs. What was supposed to be a routine "patch Tuesday" turned into a headache for customers and a PR nightmare for manufacturers. Chief among them was Phison, a prolific name in the industry whose controllers are used in drives across multiple applications—both consumer and business. Now, Phison has come forward to essentially deny these reports following internal testing, in a new press release.

In a statement, the company told Tom's Hardware that "... Phison dedicated over 4,500 cumulative testing hours to the drives reported as potentially impacted and conducted more than 2,200 test cycles. We were unable to reproduce the reported issue, and no partners or customers have reported that the issue affected their drives at this time."

Initially, reports suggested that drives powered by Phison controllers were possibly among the most impacted, following errant reports that solely Phison drives were affected by the issue. Phison acknowledged the problem early on and even released a statement to Tom's Hardware confirming that some of their drives may have been affected:

"Phison has recently been made aware of the industry-wide effects of the 'KB5063878' and ‘KB5062660’ updates on Windows 11 that potentially impacted several storage devices, including some supported by Phison.... At this time, the controllers that may have been affected are under review and we are working with partners."

After testing, Phison has come to the conclusion that the issue may have been a false alarm. Prior to this development, a fake document circulated around the internet claiming to show affected Phison controllers that the company was quick to put down. It was falsified information that might've been deliberately targeting Phison rather than helping address the issue in a meaningful way.

All of that brings us to the latest event in this chain. Despite outright refuting the SSD-breaking reports, Phison says it's still committed to providing support to its customers in case anything happens. The company advises people to use heatsinks in high-performance drives, as thermal throttling can cause SSDs to underperform.

"We continue to advise users that for extended workloads, such as transferring large files or decompressing large archives, make sure a proper heatsink or thermal pad is used with the storage device. This helps maintain optimal operating temperatures, reduces the likelihood of thermal throttling, and ensures sustained performance."

Less than 24 hours after issuing a response to reports of a Windows 11 SSD issue that is affecting a number of different drives, Phison has been forced to release a staunch rebuttal against a circulated document the company says has been falsely created and circulated amongst its customers.

On Tuesday, we reported that a Microsoft security update for Windows 11 appears to be causing SSD failures following heavy file transfers. While drives sporting Phison NAND controllers are amongst the drives affected, Phison's tech is not solely impacted, as was erroneously reported elsewhere. In a statement to Tom's Hardware, Phison confirmed it is aware of the issue and is investigating.

In the meantime, Phison says it has recently become aware of a "falsified document" that has been passed off as having originated from within the company, and has reportedly been circulated to various customers. "We wish to state unequivocally that the document in question—reproduced below—is neither an official nor unofficial communication from Phison," the company told Tom's Hardware.

Specifically, the document includes false claims regarding the aforementioned storage and data issues pertaining to the August 12 Microsoft Windows Security Updates. Pulling no punches, Phison says it is addressing the circulation of the falsified document through "appropriate legal processes."

The fake document, pictured below, bears the title "Phison SSD Controller Issues Summary" and claims to include a table of affected controller models relating to the issue. As per Phison, none of this information is official. There is no information available as to the source of the fictitious document.

Phison further reiterated that its only official statement to the media and customers on the matter was the one reported on August 19, enclosed below.

• "Phison has recently been made aware of the industry-wide effects of the 'KB5063878' and ‘KB5062660’ updates on Windows 11 that potentially impacted several storage devices, including some supported by Phison. We understand the disruption this may have caused and promptly engaged industry stakeholders. We are steadfast in our commitment to product integrity and the success of our partners and end users. At this time, the controllers that may have been affected are under review and we are working with partners. We will continue to provide updates and advisories to partners who may have been impacted to provide support and ensure any applicable remediation."

August 19, 5:30 am ET: Phison has issued the following statement to Tom's Hardware: "Phison has recently been made aware of the industry-wide effects of the 'KB5063878' and ‘KB5062660’ updates on Windows 11 that potentially impacted several storage devices, including some supported by Phison. We understand the disruption this may have caused and promptly engaged industry stakeholders. We are steadfast in our commitment to product integrity and the success of our partners and end users. At this time, the controllers that may have been affected are under review and we are working with partners. We will continue to provide updates and advisories to partners who may have been impacted to provide support and ensure any applicable remediation."

Microsoft’s latest security update for Windows 11 is allegedly causing SSD failures during heavy file transfers. The issue was reported by X user Nekorusukii @Necoru_cat, who was updating Cyberpunk 2077 on a system running Windows 11 24H2 with the KB5063878 update installed, when the SSD on which the game was installed disappeared from the operating system.

An investigation by the user reveals a potential bug that appears during continuous file transfers on certain storage devices, particularly when the transfer exceeds 50GB and the drive is over 60% full. In these cases, the SSD can sometimes disappear from within the operating system. While restarting the PC makes the SSD visible again, the issue seems to occur again as soon as a large data transfer is performed again.

It was earlier reported that the issue lies within how SSDs handle cache, especially DRAM-less models equipped with Phison NAND controllers, but it turns out the problem isn't confined to those types of drives. A series of tests was carried out to establish the scope of the problem, which included copying Cyberpunk 2077's Steam library folder to the drive, preparing a compressed archive, and then copying the expanded archive into the target storage.

Out of the 21 drives tested, it was found that 12 of them became inaccessible, but only the Western Digital SA510 2TB could not be recovered, even after a reboot. This indicates that the issue seems to impact SSDs with multiple types of SSD controllers.

Nekorusukii has listed the complete findings and explains that the SSDs were tested only on his own system, so the results may not offer enough proof on the real-time performance of these drives. Additionally, they do not assert that the Windows 11 24H2 KB5063878 or the previously released KB5062660 updates are directly responsible for the issues. However, a separate report by Japanese outlet NichePCGamer has further identified at least eight users on X who are facing similar issues on their respective drives.

According to a user with a SanDisk Extreme Pro M.2 NVMe 3D SSD, the drive became inaccessible after installing a 50GB update for Honkai: Star Rail. Although restarting the system resolved the issue, the user encountered it again on multiple occasions in August. Suspecting the KB5062660 update as the cause, the user deleted the update file, after which the problem no longer occurred.

By the looks of it, the issue doesn’t seem to be widespread. While we wait for Microsoft and SSD manufacturers to acknowledge the bug, it is best to stay cautious, especially if you are dealing with large continuous file transfers on systems running the latest Windows 11 KB5063878 update.

TeamGroup is a company that tends to adopt multiple SSD platforms to ensure it has relevant drives at competitive price points. Back in the day, the company would not even disclose the controller or memory producer for its SSDs to remain flexible. However, nowadays, the company has grown large enough to support multiple high-end PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD lineups based on four different controllers.

Indeed, TeamGroup demonstrated six different SSD families offering different levels of performance based on controllers from Innogrit (IG5666), Maxio Technology (MAP1806), Phison (PS5028-E28), and Silicon Motion (SM2508) at Computex 2025. All of these drives use 3D TLC NAND memory from various makers to hit different price points, and all of them are definitely contenders to get into our best SSDs list.

TeamGroup is gearing up to launch its flagship T-Force Z5 Z54E based on the Phison PS5028-E28 controller for gamers, as well as the T-Force ME Pro based on the Silicon Motion SM2508 for a more professional segment. The key selling point of the T-Force Z54E will be unbeatable sequential read and write performance. On the other hand, the key selling point of the T-Force ME Pro will be its relatively low heat dissipation and power consumption, something that creative professionals with laptops or compact desktops will appreciate.

The company also displayed a rather interesting T-Force Z5 Z55A4 drive, based on the Maxiotek MAP1806 controller, the company's first PCIe Gen5 SSD without a DRAM cache and one of its first offerings based on a controller from Maxio. The storage solution promises a maximum sequential read speed of 14 GB/s as well as a maximum sequential write speed of 12 GB/s. Interestingly, the Z55A4 SSD prototype demonstrated at the show did not carry either 3D NAND or DRAM memory.

Additionally, TeamGroup offers three different 'Pro' badged drives based on the Innogrit IG5666 controller. There’s the higher-end T-Force Ge Pro that peaks at 14 GB/s and 11.8 GB/s sequential read and write speeds as well as GC Pro and GA Pro drives that are considerably slower and cheaper.

Phison has been showcasing its data storage innovations at Computex 2025. Of particular interest, we attended a partner demo where the firm utilized 32 of its latest and greatest PCIe Gen5 SSDs in a RAID setup. During the demo, we saw CrystalDiskMark report data transfer rates as high as 113.6 GB/s for reads, and 104.6 GB/s for writes.

The PS5028 for AI Workstation Live Demo

This demonstration of extraordinary speed was enabled by a powerful modern workstation PC and a mix of cutting-edge storage components. Specifically, Phison utilized an AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7978WX CPU, installed on an Asus Pro WS WRX90E-Sage SE motherboard, as the foundation of the system.

The storage subsystem consisted of 32 of Phison’s potent new E28 Gen5 SSDs installed across a trio of Apex Storage X16 Gen5 add-in cards. All these components were installed in a sweet-looking be quiet! chassis, as you can see.

Phison’s new E28 Gen5 SSD rubs shoulders with the best in consumer mid-2025 PC land. A single E28 Gen5 in a modern PC will be able to deliver data transfer speeds of up to 14.8 GB/s reads and 14.0 GB/s writes. The Phison E28 Gen5 is being marketed as “the weapon of choice for serious gaming and productivity,” so it is definitely targeting consumers. Its controller features a quad-CPU architecture, is fabbed on TSMC’s 6nm node, and supports up to 32 TB.

Here we had 32 of Phison’s new E28 Gen5 SSDs; however, each Apex Storage X16 Gen5 add-in card can fit 16 M.2 SSDs (there’s a clue in the name), so two would have sufficed for a 32x SSD demo. We guess three cards were installed for optimal performance, load balancing, or another nuance of the Threadripper-powered Windows system.

The storage performance in this setup seems remarkable. Witnessed data transfer rates as high as 113.6 GB/s for reads, and 104.6 GB/s for writes might seem amazing. However, it was confirmed by a Phison rep that the Windows kernel was actually holding back performance.

Phison is demonstrating the capabilities of its upcoming flagship E28 PCIe 5.0 controller at Computex 2025, where it appears to excel over its rivals. The E28 thrashes competitors like Samsung's fastest 9100 Pro offerings in random reads and writes, achieving parity in sequential reads and delivering impressive efficiency numbers.

Building on its CES 2025 unveiling, the E28 is now roaring to life, driving a reference platform. The Phison E28 serves as the company's long-awaited successor to the E26, which for a long while was hailed as the fastest PCIe 5.0 offering, eventually surpassed by SiliconMotion's SM2508 and Samsung's Presto. The E28 is fabbed using TSCM's 6nm process, compared to the 12 nm-based E26, while supporting upwards of 32TB of TLC flash along with robust error correction technologies like LPDC and RAID ECC. It supports an eight-channel layout at 4200 MT/s along with AES-256, TCG Opal, and Pyrite encryption capabilities.

Phison advertises the E28 with 14.8 GB/s and 14 GB/s sequential read and write speeds, only second to SanDisk's WD SN8100. The E28 truly excels in random I/O, thrashing all competition with remarkable read and write IOPS of 2,600K and 3,000K, respectively. This effectively dethrones Samsung's Presto-powered 9100 Pro by 400 IOPS across each department. The E28 is touted by Phison as the first controller to feature integrated AI processing, which supposedly makes future SSDs powered by these controllers a great fit for accelerating AI/ML workloads and the like.

In some images we managed to grab, the Phison E28 reference platform almost breaches the 15 GB/s barrier, powering a Ryzen 7 9700X and Asus ROG Crosshair X870E equipped system. Phison claims 15% lower power consumption versus competing 6nm-based alternatives. In sustained workloads, when equipped with the MSI Raider GE78 HX 14VGG with the i9-14900HX, the controller's average power draw peaked at 7.46W, a notable improvement over the E26.

The figures also check out with exclusive benchmarks of the E28 we shared previously.

Phison was the first company to offer an SSD controller with a PCIe 5.0 x4 host interface and was the indisputable leader in the market of enthusiast-grade SSDs for a couple of years. This week, the company cemented its lead by introducing its next-generation PCIe 5.0 SSD controller for the best high-end SSDs, the PS5028-E28. The new chip promises even higher performance and compatibility with next-gen 3D NAND.

The Phison PS5028-E28 is a brand-new, eight-channel controller that can work with upcoming types of 3D NAND featuring a 4200 MT/s interface and supports SSDs with a 32TB capacity. Regarding performance, the unit promises a maximum sequential read and write performance of 14.5 GB/s (the absolute maximum that a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface can offer) as well as a maximum random read and write performance of 3 million IOPS.

Due to its compatibility with next-generation 3D NAND memory, the Phison E28 controller will enable SSDs with capacities of up to 32TB, which is good enough for client PCs, workstations, and even entry-level datacenter applications.

Phison did not disclose many specifications for its new E28 controller. However, it is reasonable to expect it to have improved compute capabilities compared to the E26 to ensure compatibility with upcoming generations of 3D NAND memory and to provide enhanced functionality.

Phison uses TSMC's N6 process technology (6nm-class) to make its PS5028-E28 chip, which is a significant upgrade compared to TSMC's 12FFC (12nm-class) production node used to make the PS5026-E26 controller. The average power consumption of an E28-based SSD will be around 8.5W, which is slightly higher than the 7W advertised for E26-based drives. However, this is expected since NAND memory gets more complex and requires more processing to read reliably.

At its CES 2025 booth, Phison demonstrated E28-based SSDs with 3D TLC NAND memory from Kioxia (T2BIGB5A2V), which is unsurprising as the two companies work closely together. Over time, the controller will be qualified with 3D NAND memory from other makers, including Micron.

It is hard to say when exactly the actual SSDs based on Phison's PS5028-E28 controller will hit the market. Still, knowing how long it takes to qualify a new controller with advanced memory, we would speculate that the next-generation PCIe 5.0 x4 drives will be available a year from now.

"The Mountain" from Game of Thrones, AKA Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, has succeeded in deadlifting 282.624 PB of SSDs. At a somewhat incongruous but crowd-pleasing event at SC24 in Atlanta earlier this week, the strongman broke the “deadlift of data” record with his stupendous feat. For those curious about the physical mass of the data – including the bar, silver dollar boxes, and mammoth quantity of Phison Pascari D205V PCIe Gen5 122.88TB class drives – the total deadlift weight was 996 pounds (~452kg).

282PB of data is a huge amount of 0s and 1s. Using more familiar units of storage, it is 282,000 TB, or 282,000,000 GB of data. If you were to use the storage to archive DVD movies of approximately 4GB each, for example, you would be able to squirrel away 70.4 million of them on the silver dollar deadlifted data cache. These figures illustrate the astronomical data densities technology is delivering in 2024. And remember, the reinforced metal bar and custom silver dollar boxes would be pretty heavy for most people, even when empty.

We wouldn’t want to cast shade on the 282PB deadlift of data achieved by Björnsson. However, 996 lbs isn’t an astounding weight in the silver dollar deadlift world. According to the World Deadlifting Council, Rauno Heinla has successfully hoisted a mass of 1,279 lbs in this deadlift fashion.

The silver dollar deadlift SC24 event wasn’t organized for the love of the sport, of course. AI and HPC infrastructure company VDURA organized and sponsored it, collaborating with flash storage tech leader Phison. Earlier, we mentioned that the silver dollar boxes were stuffed with Phison’s awesome Pascari D205V drives.

Phison’s PCIe Gen5 enterprise-grade devices can hold 122.88TB each and promise a sequential read speed of up to 14,600 MB/s and a sequential write speed of up to 3,200 MB/s. They also promise a random read performance of 3,000K 4K IOPS and 35K random write 16K IOPS. Our back-of-a-napkin calculation indicates that these huge-capacity D205V drives weigh less than 0.44 pounds (200g) each.

Considering the above astounding numbers, we wish the world of consumer SSDs would pick up the pace and make drives greater than 4TB more commonplace. If you are interested in maxing out your PC storage, though, you can find a bargain WD_Black SN850X 8TB drive highlighted in our Black Friday SSD and Storage Deals Live blog.

Phison has introduced its Pascari D205V datacenter SSD with a capacity of up to 128TB and a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. The drive is aimed at AI training as well as media streaming applications that demand both high capacity and high performance. In an email Tom's Hardware received, Phison said the SSD will be available in the second quarter of next year and its clients can use the platform to build their own drives.

Phison's Pascari D205V datacenter SSD with 128TB of raw NAND memory (which provides a capacity of 122.88TB) is based on the Phison X2 controller and 2Tb 3D QLC NAND devices. The drive promises a sequential read speed of up to 14,600 MB/s and a sequential write speed of up to 3,200 MB/s as well as a random read performance of 3,000K 4K IOPS and 35K random write 16K IOPS, which makes it one of the fastest enterprise-grade SSD in the world and the fastest 120TB-class SSD in the industry. The platform is rated for 0.3 drive writes per day.

The new Pascari D205V has a PCIe 5.0 x4 single port interface or two PCIe 5.0 x2 dual port interfaces. Also, the model has power loss protection.

The Pascari D205V datacenter SSD is compatible with the latest servers supporting a PCIe 5.0 interface and can offer unprecedented performance while storing up to 2.2PB of data in a standard server with 24 drives. Yet, since Phison does not disclose the power consumption of its Pascari D205V SSD, it is impossible to say whether this product is drop-in compatible with all of the existing servers.

Phison's Pascari D205V drives in U.2 and E3.L form factors are available for preorder now and are expected to ship in early Q2 2025.

Phison is generally known as a leading developer of SSD controllers and platforms for client (some of the best consumer SSDs use Phison's controllers), embedded, and enterprise drives. The company's technology powers SSDs from major brands and controls a sizeable market share. But this year the company decided to go further and introduce Pascari: its own brand for enterprise-grade SSDs.

By developing its own reference drives for datacenters, Phison enables enterprises that want to adopt the latest storage technology to get it directly from the renowned developer of SSD platforms - instead of waiting for branded makers of solid-state drives to roll out their solutions based on the same controller.

"With the acceleration in AI training and data-intensive workloads there has been a tangible shift to a future-forward focus on storage as a critical component in capturing necessary volume to support data quality and integrity," said Michael Wu, General Manager and President, of Phison US. "With today's launch, each drive maximizes capacity while reducing power, space, and cooling constraints to minimize bottlenecks for transformative use cases. Customers can essentially push past previous infrastructure barriers to continue to scale as the market demands."

The drive of your dreams is almost here. High performance, good power efficiency, and PCIe 5.0 levels of bandwidth for today and tomorrow. Phison’s E31T SSD controller enables amazing things for storage when paired with the latest flash, promising all-new heights for whatever system you use. Coming just after our preview of Silicon Motion’s SM2508 controller, the E31T takes a different tack, building a drive for everyone rather than just enthusiasts. In many ways, that will be more impactful in the long run.

Phison, the undisputed leader in consumer SSD controller design — when you consider the raw cadence of its releases and industry firsts in recent years — is not without its share of growing pains. As the focus on R&D has increased, so have the troubles that come with being on the cutting edge. Phison has had some firmware issues in the last few years and even more recently, although in general these have not widely impacted users. Normally this might be something that hits one’s reputation, but every proprietary brand — WD, SK hynix, Samsung, and even Crucial with its MX500 — has had firmware issues in recent memory.

Which we bring up today because this E31T engineering sample needs to be taken within the context of it being a work in progress with novel technology. There may be a few final issues to iron out, but we anticipate that happening before drives using the E31T platform become available at retail. We aim for full disclosure of any and all problems when we review a new drive, as it’s best to report these failings so things get fixed and hopefully don’t happen again in the future.

To present one example, SK hynix — and Solidigm for that matter — have not issued a firmware fix for the Platinum P41/P44 Pro pSLC degradation problem. This has led to a slew of RMAs and negative reviews and forum posts. Phison, when presented with sufficient evidence over time of its own issues, fully tested, reported, and fixed any firmware problems. What that means is that we are willing to give it a chance to prove that lessons are learned moving forward.

The Phison E31T is a good example of that. This is really more of a preview than a review but we were under no obligation to treat it like the former. Its ability to stand up to review levels of scrutiny is part of what makes it exciting, but we remind you that there is still some work to be done.

Phison E31T ES Specifications

The specifications for the E31T indicate that it will come in 1TB and 2TB capacities with performance up to 10,300 / 8,600 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1,300K / 1,500K random read and write IOPS. It’s potentially possible to reach higher random read IOPS with this hardware, but the performance level is already high.

We suspect that 4TB drives are a foregone conclusion, but those may take a while longer to arrive. The controller is capable of handling up to 8TB with the right flash, but we would consider 2TB to be the sweet spot for this sort of hardware. At 1TB you can still get a lot of performance, though, and 4TB will have to compete against existing budget drives like the Teamgroup MP44.

Drives based on the E31T should have the standard five-year warranty with 600TB or more writes per TB capacity. That's subject to modification by the individual drive manufacturers once SSDs begin shipping, naturally.

Phison E31T ES: A Closer Look

The drive consists of the SSD controller, two NAND flash packages, and the power management integrated circuit (PMIC). It’s single-sided, which is a bonus as that increases compatibility with host systems and can be easier to cool. It’s theoretically possible to do 4TB single-sided, which was not the case with the DRAM-equipped Crucial T500. However, we have seen 4TB on drives like the Crucial P3 Plus — with Phison’s E21T and four NAND flash packages — and the Lexar NM790, with the Maxio MAP1602 and four packages.

It might be challenging to handle 4TB or more at higher signal speeds in some cases, as the 4TB T500 does have extra circuitry for that. The E31T as designed is meant to have just two NAND flash packages, which could limit its potential to some degree, but it also means designs in other M.2 form factors are an easier task.

The Phison E31T SSD controller probably has the most in common with the E27T. We’ve reviewed several drives using the latter, including the Sabrent Rocket 4 and the updated Corsair MP600 Mini in the M.2 2230 form factor. The E27T, in turn, is similar to the E21T, used to good effect on popular budget drives like the Teamgroup MP44L. All these controllers have the same basic hardware but with increasing clock speeds for the microprocessor. This is needed, in part, to keep up with increasing bus speeds, which is required to get the most out of newer flash for the highest performance levels.

The E31T is more than just a PCIe 5.0 version of the E27T, though. It has some improvements. The first is an upgrade in the LDPC error correction to a newer generation, which isn’t exciting on its own. Error correction improvements can heighten performance and/or NAND flash endurance and are necessary as I/O speed increases and we begin to see more 4-bit QLC flash, which is more sensitive to wear than 3-bit TLC flash in return for higher bit density or capacity. The bigger change for this controller is that it’s manufactured using TSMC’s 7nm, or N7, process node instead of the older 12nm FinFET. N7 is far more efficient and allows for high performance from a PCIe 5.0 SSD without requiring a heatsink.

It also helps get more performance out of a four-channel controller like the E31T. More powerful controllers like the E26 — see the Crucial T705 — have twice as many channels and DRAM. To get higher relative levels of performance out of the DRAM-less E31T, faster flash must be used, in this case 3600 MT/s BiCS8 TLC flash. As mentioned above, this means higher clocks and that translates to higher power consumption for the controller. The move to N7 helps nudge the E31T above any and all PCIe 4.0 SSDs without having to compromise with overwhelming heat output.

This is also the first time we’ve had a chance to see BiCS8 flash in action. It comes in at 218 layers with four planes and enhanced bonding technology which, among other things, continues the trend of improving power efficiency from circuit under array (CuA). It’s purportedly using a wafer bonded design reminiscent of YMTC’s breakthrough Xtacking technology, which we have discussed in the past as one way of handling the move to a higher layer count. Additionally, the move from two planes — common with BiCS5 flash, the WD Black SN770 being a fair sample — to four means higher bandwidth from increased parallelization.

BiCS8 also promises to have higher-density QLC flash, but for now we’re focusing on the TLC. The top question is probably how it handles 4K latency. Based on information released by WD and Kioxia, the read latency on this flash should be equal to or better than any other flash we’ve tested to date. We’ll put that to the test with CrystalDiskMark in a moment.

One possible reason BiCS8 performs so differently, as you will see, is because of the sub-plane design — this is something Samsung did a while back with its flash, splitting the typical 16KB pages into two 8KB sub-pages — while still using an edge rather than center decoder. A center decoder design can reduce latency further but the sub-plane architecture could compensate for now. The fact that E31T can push so much performance at 1TB, even with dense flash, is possibly due to this design. This is a pretty big change for BiCS in general but some further refinement is possible in the future, as we have already seen YMTC’s flash improve with every iteration. 

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Comparison Products

As the E31T ES is a PCiE 5.0 SSD, we need to see how it handles the existing crop of 5.0 drives, along with upcoming drives as well. This breaks down to a few different basic hardware configurations. Phison was the first to market with its E26 controller, used at first in slower options like the Crucial T700 before being optimized with faster releases — the Crucial T705 and the write-optimized Sabrent Rocket 5 being prime examples. Alternative, comparable controllers are represented by the InnoGrit IG5666-based Adata Legend 970 Pro and upcoming drives based on Silicon Motion’s SM2508 controller.

We also want to see how the E31T handles the very best last-generation PCIe 4.0 SSDs. These include the SK hynix Platinum P41, Samsung 990 Pro, and WD Black SN850X. We also want to compare a couple of high-end budget drives, one based on Maxio’s MAP1602 — the Silicon Power US75 is a suitable representative — as well as the popular DRAM-equipped Crucial T500. Lastly, to show the difference between what a mid-range 5.0 drive like the E31T ES can do compared to a mid-range 4.0 drive, we have added in the Samsung 990 EVO.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed. 

The Phison E31T ES’s 3DMark performance is good but not great. It’s certainly fast enough to be a game drive, if that’s your thing, especially looking forward with Phison’s DirectStorage-optimized firmware. The PCIe 5.0 SSDs with DRAM and the full interface bandwidth — the T705, SM2508 ES, and Rocket 5 — can all push more bandwidth than the E31T ES. That said, the latter is more than a match for any PCIe 4.0 drive, which is important as it can be run in a 4.0 slot and drives with the E31T may end up being cost-competitive with some of the best last-generation drives. 

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments. 

The PCMark10 results follow in line with 3DMark, which is generally but not always the case. The E31T ES’s numbers aren’t earth-shattering by any means, but they need to be taken within a wider context. This especially means looking at power consumption and suitability for laptops, which we will discuss more in detail later. 

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. In our testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling, though the Phison E31T could change that. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use. 

Our PS5 tests have changed to a small degree over time due to various system updates, but the values are still within a small range. Most of the faster drives come close to the PCIe 4.0 interface limit on the PS5 read test, while the write to and read from M.2 tests tend to encounter other bottlenecks like the PS5 internal SSD's encryption algorithm.

That said, the E31T ES breaks the mold with its bandwidth in our "read from M.2" transfer test, rising above previous generation SSDs. It's a bit weird and we're not entirely sure what has changed, as we previously assumed it was the internal SSD holding back performance. We checked the numbers twice, however, as well as having tested a couple of other SSDs in recent days, and that 264 MB/s result is legit. It's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but drives based on the E31T should become a great option for the PS5 — if the price is right. 

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives. 

Copy transfer rates can vary significantly from one drive to another, especially when factoring in the drive generation. A PCIe 5.0 SSD with maximum bandwidth, like the Rocket 5, has a higher ceiling than a last-generation SN850X. Slower drives like the 990 EVO suffer even more. So it’s not too hard to predict where the E31T ES should land in our DiskBench testing — above the PCIe 4.0 SSDs, but below the faster 5.0 ones. This in and of itself doesn’t mean much, but if you’re someone who transfers files around a lot it could make a difference in daily operations due to lower waiting times.

If your intention is to put this drive into an enclosure this can also be important, but at these speeds you are looking at USB4 or Thunderbolt enclosures — which can support the host memory buffer (HMB) feature as well — and an E31T drive might be a great choice there because it’s more efficient and won’t overheat like previous PCIe 5.0 options. Sustained performance may be lower, however, reflected in our write saturation testing further below. 

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads. 

Starting with ATTO, the E31T ES performs as expected with writes but has some variance when it comes to reads. Given the performance levels demonstrated in other tests, we can chalk this up to our sample being a work-in-progress. It is likely due to the controller firmware, possibly amplified by the use of flash that’s new to the market. We saw no real world impact from this, but our results here show that there are kinks to work out when it comes to innovative products like the Silicon Motion SM2508 or the E31T.

CDM tells us a little more about the sequential performance, with good results for the E31T. This is expected as it has more bandwidth available to it than PCIe 4.0 SSDs like the 990 Pro and T500. However, its sequential read performance at a queue depth of 1 — and this is a common workload for many things, like game or app loading — falls behind the T500 and Platinum P41. There isn’t a huge difference here, but we can hypothesize that the T500’s six-plane flash and the Platinum P41’s less-dense flash dies both enable more interleaving for this workload.

This dovetails well with our expectations mentioned earlier, which is to say that the BiCS8 flash may have some architectural optimizations for smaller I/O. CDM shows this off in its full glory with the E31T ES scoring the lowest 4KB QD1 random read latency in our testing to date. Specifically, it beats the original 990 Pro, which was long our champion after it came out. The E31T sample also beats even very fast drives when it comes to 4KB QD1 random write latency. On top of this, the drive can reach IOPS that were once unthinkable for a DRAM-less drive, demonstrating once and for all that the era of needing DRAM and a full eight channels for impressive SSD performance is over.

We caution you from reading too much into the 4KB latencies because real-world performance will differ from synthetic testing, especially for workloads that fall out of the temporary cache. Additionally, many day-to-day workloads involve larger I/O or sequential workloads even where you wouldn’t expect it. Lastly, there are many places for bottlenecks such that subjective feel between one SSD and another can be practically nonexistent. On the other hand, there’s no doubt that the E31T ES performs exceptionally well in this classic benchmark.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, which is the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 30 minutes or more to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance. 

The 2TB E31T ES writes in the single-bit pSLC mode at up to 8.8 GB/s for around 50 seconds, indicating a cache that could be as large as 440GB. This is not as large as it could be — 2TB of TLC flash in pSLC mode allows for up to ~680GB — but it's still a very large cache. Phison has generally been reserved in its caching with recent designs — the Sabrent Rocket 4 with the E27T controller is a great example — possibly in part because the Crucial T500 and its E25 controller had inconsistent write performance with the latter’s large cache. Large caches are often more popular these days, though, since normally that’s where the drive is operating for day-to-day writes.

Once the E31T ES leaves the pSLC mode, it hits a direct-to-TLC mode at around 1.5 GB/s. This is significantly slower than what we would expect from this flash. There are reasons why it would be this low, although simply being a trade-off for the larger cache while avoiding a slow folding state for as long as possible is a good enough explanation. If the drive runs out of space and has to empty the pSLC cache forcibly, this folding state makes for slower writes — in this case, 800 MB/s or less — with less consistent performance and higher latencies.

For those wanting higher sustained writes speeds, we certainly think this flash can deliver it, but it doesn’t make too much sense to optimize a drive like this in that manner. 

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature. 

The E31T controller, being a four-channel DRAM-less solution built on TSMC N7, unsurprisingly is super efficient even compared to the N6 SM2508. It’s quite simply the most efficient hardware we’ve ever seen. The combination of this controller with efficient flash is bound to be a winner. It will work in laptops, it will work in PS5s, it will work in HTPCs and many other machines, too. There’s no compromise here for great performance.

Generally speaking, lower power consumption correlates with thermal output. This isn’t 100% true for a variety of reasons, since temperature can impact efficiency and there are other factors such as controller and IHS design. However, to simplify for most SSDs that come across our desk, our power results made us expect the E31T ES would run relatively cool.

This proves correct, as the drive reached a maximum of 56°C in our testing and only briefly at that. The 55°C realistic maximum is 18°C below the first throttling point, which leaves plenty of thermal headroom. While the SM2508 could potentially be used in a laptop — at least at 1TB — the E31T is the first PCIe 5.0 SSD controller that will be put into drives that actually can be safely used without a heatsink, which includes in laptops.

We nevertheless still recommend a heatsink if a drive is used in a desktop. This can be a motherboard-included M.2 heatsink, a third party heatsink, or your own solution. This is especially true if you’re buying a drive for heavier use or sustained workloads, although as per the Sustained Write section above we think there are better options than the E31T ES for that purpose. Also, if you have an X670E motherboard, be aware of a motherboard bug that impacts 5.0 SSDs. 

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

 Phison E31T ES Bottom Line 

The Phison E31T SSD controller is an accomplishment only slightly dimmed by the recent sample of SMI’s faster SM2508. These are two amazing platforms coming out at nearly the same time, promising two very different things. While the SM2508 is the more traditional eight-channel, DRAM-equipped powerhouse, the E31T is a more accessible four-channel, DRAM-less design. There are places for both of these in the marketplace and it’s great to see more efficient PCIe 5.0 options coming to the table. This is especially true with the older Phison E26 and InnoGrit IG5666 controllers both requiring heatsinks and being essentially impossible to run outside of enthusiast desktop PCs.

While the SM2508 we tested could theoretically be used in a laptop, the E31T ES is the first PCIe 5.0 drive we’ve seen that could actually be recommended for such use. Moreover, while this might almost seem moot as laptops generally support PCIe 4.0 SSDs at the fastest, the E31T might still be up your alley. This is because its excellent power efficiency would be even higher in a 4.0 slot. This means lower power consumption on the whole, but also lower thermal output. It’s by no means the only drive that will work well, but it’s an extra option for those that want the highest performance without sacrificing elsewhere.

Full PCIe 4.0 performance can already be had with decent efficiency in several popular mainstream solutions, though. Maxio’s MAP1602 with YMTC flash — usually TLC flash, but there are QLC alternatives — is a very popular combination, as seen by the Silicon Power US75 throughout this review. Crucial’s T500 remains popular as it’s the main drive available with DRAM that’s efficient enough for everyday laptops. Phison’s E27T controller also works wonders in drives like the Sabrent Rocket 4. These are all based on 12nm designs with their own advantages and disadvantages, but the 7nm node ultimately leaves the E31T a cut above if you truly want the newest and shiniest hardware.

Realistically, though, you can get enough performance out of some mid-range PCIe 4.0 SSDs like the Teamgroup MP44 and WD Black SN770, or maybe the WD Blue SN580 or WD Blue SN5000. These drives are all great up to and including 2TB, and QLC flash may be acceptable at 4TB in drives like the Crucial P3 Plus. After all, the E31T does not have 4TB specifications just yet, although ultimately that capacity will come. It’s probably not a good idea to go with some of the high-end options with eight channels and DRAM — the WD Black SN850X being the most prominent example — if you’re trying to have a svelte solution for your mobile experience. For desktops and workstations, though, you can afford to go with the faster options, including the previously listed PCIe 5.0 heavy hitters.

Coming back around, it’s impossible for us to not sing praises for the E31T. It’s powerful, it’s efficient, and it’s the future. With availability and reasonable pricing it’ll be the backbone of new builds everywhere, even for PCIe 4.0 systems. We know you want 4TB drives and Phison knows this too, but 2TB remains the sweet spot for now and our sample performed admirably.

The E31T doesn’t have the raw bandwidth of eight-channel solutions, but its use of new flash results in an extremely efficient and effective platform that can provide an excellent experience for almost anything. It shouldn't be the first choice for a sustained write workhorse drive, either, but there will be drives for that, and the firmware will be smoothed out before release for better all-around consistency. If you’re looking for a fast drive with no drawbacks, anything built on this technology should be an easy pick.

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During the Future of Memory and Storage 2024 (FMS 2024) conference (previously Flash Memory Summit), Phison debuted its latest Gen4 SSD controller, the Phison PS5023-E29T. This SSD controller is targeted at upcoming NVMe Gen4 drives in the M.2-2280 and M.2-2230 form factors and is now nearly the fastest SSD controller in Phison's lineup, beating all of them in sequential read performance and only beaten by the enterprise-grade PS5020-X1 controller for U.2 and U.3 SSDs, which has a slight advantage in sequential write performance and (of course) exponentially higher maximum capacity.

Phison PS5029-E29T SSD Controller Specifications vs Other Phison PCIe Gen 4 Controllers

In the overall lineup, it seems clear that the Phison PS5029-E29T SSD controller is meant to occupy the new high-end for M.2 NVMe SSDs, particularly those in "standard" size (M.2-2280) and the low-profile M.2 drives (M.2-2230) that have become more commonplace in laptops, mini PCs, and handheld PCs like Steam Deck.

We previously covered the very similar Phison PS5027-E27T in January, which also used the TSMC 12nm process to target similar devices but is slightly slower than the newer controller, managing only 6,700 MB/s write compared to the E29T's faster 6,800 MB/s write speeds, though read speeds are identical at 7,400 MB/s. Of note for Steam Deck and its class of handheld PCs is that these faster Gen4 M.2-2230 NVMe drives will only be helpful in devices that actually support NVMe Gen4 — as the Steam Deck and many others are still on Gen3.

Finally, the Phison PS5029-E29T also utilizes a DRAM-less design like its E27T predecessor and is driven by an ARM Cortex R5 CPU. The E29T supports both 3D TLC and 3D QLC NAND, with TLC (Triple-Level Cells vs Quad-Level Cells), of course, being faster and offering greater durability. NAND flash speeds on the E29T will top out at 3,600 MT/s either way, though, just like the E27T.

Although NAND manufacturers have recently been enjoying high revenues thanks to higher prices, Phison CEO K. S. Pua says further price hikes could seriously reduce demand (via Digitimes). Instead of allowing demand to outstrip supply, Pua says manufacturers should try and meet demand with increased production.

The recent price increases for NAND flash, and by extension SSDs, is a reaction to the experience NAND manufacturers had in 2022 and 2023. While the COVID-19 pandemic fueled strong demand for computer components, this demand significantly fell once things (mostly) got back to normal. But NAND companies like Samsung and Micron didn't anticipate such a sharp decline in demand, and so had way more supply than they actually needed. Consequently, prices had to come down in order to boost demand and offload all the excess NAND.

The industry saw big losses because of this, prompting Pua to say that if prices needed to go down further, then it would risk industry-wide bankruptcies. However, that didn't happen as excess supply was successfully cleared out, production was cut, and demand began to rise once more. Q4 of last year saw substantial recovery for the NAND market, and 2024 is expected to be even better thanks to steady price increases on SSDs.

However, it seems that Phison's CEO is concerned that if prices go too high, that demand will begin to falter once more. There is some logic behind this line of thought; all computing devices need a storage medium and solid-state storage is the most popular option now. So even if prices go up, people still need to buy them. But, there's undoubtedly a price where consumers would rather get less storage in order to save money, and perhaps not buy any secondary storage at all.

Pua suggests that NAND manufacturers should end the production cuts and start meeting demand, instead of permitting low supply and high demand to boost prices. Of course, since flash memory makers just got out of a downturn caused by oversupply, they're probably wary of the same thing happening again. After all, the global economy isn't in great shape, and if things take a turn for the worse, demand for computer parts (including SSDs) would probably go down just as NAND supply goes up.

Industry analysts predict 2024 will be a year of substantially higher SSD prices, and that's on top of price increases that have been happening since late 2023. Should this trend continue, we may very well see if Pua's prediction comes true and whether SSDs hit a price that consumers agree is too high.

Sabrent has begun sales of its highly anticipated Rocket 5 solid state drives that promise to become some of the best SSDs available today. The drives have the PCIe 5.0 x4 interface and boast a sequential read speed of up to 14 GB/s, which is in line with other top-end SSDs. However, performance comes at a cost.

"You are ready for something new," a statement by Sabrent reads. "We are here to deliver. Our freshest, super-fast SSD, the Rocket 5, is finally here." 

Sabrent's Rocket 5 is based on the Phison PS5026-E26 controller as well as Micron's 3D TLC NAND memory with a 2400 MT/s data transfer rate. The higher-end 2TB and 4TB drives are officially rated for an up to 14,000 MB/s sequential read speed as well as an up to 12,000 MB/s sequential write speed, along with a random read/write capability of 1.4 million IOPS. The 1 TB version has slightly reduced speeds — up to 13,000 MB/s and up to 9,500 MB/s — due to a lower degree of parallelism, yet it will still outperform many of the currently available drives that use a PCIe Gen5 x4 interface. 

Speaking of contemporary high-end PCIe Gen5 SSDs that use the Phison PS5026-E26 controller, the vast majority of them typically achieve maximum sequential read speeds ranging from 10 GB/s to 12 GB/s, with the speed varying based on the type of 3D NAND paired with the potent controller. Initially, these drives were equipped with 1600 MT/s 3D NAND, but more recent versions have been upgraded to 2000 MT/s 3D NAND. Now that 2400 MT/s 3D NAND is available, Sabrent can release its Rocket 5 with up to 14,000 MB/s sequential write speed. To make this SSD possible, Sabrent has collaborated with Phison to maximize the performance of the controller and come close to fully saturating the nearly 16GB/s bandwidth of a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. 

Sabrent believes that the Sabrent Rocket 5 drives will operate smoothly with heatsinks provided by high-end motherboards. For systems that lack pre-installed heatsinks for some reason, Sabrent will also include a relatively large active cooling solution with the drive. 

For obvious reasons, Sabrent's Rocket 5 is a quite expensive product. The 1TB version is priced at $190, the 2TB model carries a $340 price tag, and a 4TB costs $730.

Phison Max14um introduction

When we first looked at Phison’s Max14um reference design, so-named because it was targeting the 14 GB/s performance point, we had some questions. Can it really achieve even higher levels of performance out of a PCIe 5.0 platform? Phison assured us that it honed its design to meet the original desired specifications while still operating within reasonable power limits. We expect multiple manufacturers to come out with their own versions of the design to compete with the best SSDs — particularly with custom cooling solutions, acknowledging that, yes, this level of performance is possible without any insane trade-offs, even if some of the heatsinks make it seem otherwise.

The ostensible lure of the Max14um design is that it can provide higher levels of bandwidth within the same nominal M.2 power limit. In fact, having to design around that power limit means that the reference model is potentially faster in other areas than the original drives as well, due to varied optimizations.

Make no mistake: Power consumption and thermal output are still notably high, but this drive feels closer to what Phison first laid out a year ago. We are impressed with its across-the-board performance, including sustained write speeds. These upcoming SSDs are absolutely worth a look for the storage enthusiast.

Max14um Specifications

Drives built on the Max14um platform will be available in capacities of 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. While the exact specifications vary, the reference design is rated for up to 14,000 / 12,000 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1500K / 1600K random read/write IOPS. Drive warranty may also vary, but the standard warranty will be for five years and up to 700TB of writes per TB of capacity. The Phison E26 is built to support TCG OPAL 2.0 for hardware encryption, but this feature is optional.

The default mean time between failure (MTBF) rating is for 1.6 million hours, derived via reliability simulation — which can be largely discounted as being relevant for consumers. Although active power is not officially listed for the 4TB capacity, we know that Phison is bumping up against the M.2 11.555W average power limit on these drives. There are no other surprises here.

Software and accessories

Software as provided by individual drive manufacturers will vary, but most of the prominent ones offer SSD toolboxes for basic functionality and optionally OEM software for imaging and cloning. There are free options for the majority of features, but the presence of a toolbox for drive sanitization and firmware updates is preferred. Phison provides the mechanism for firmware updates and it is up to the manufacturer to test and provide the relevant updates. For this reference drive, no software was provided.

A closer look at the Phison Max14um reference drive

As is well-known by now, these Phison E26 PCIe 5.0 SSDs need a significant amount of cooling, and a heatsink is required for proper operation. The reference design also includes active cooling via a small fan, powered by a 4-pin fan connector with PWM support. In testing, we generally have found that you can get away without using the fan on these drives in a PC with decent airflow. In some extreme cases like sustained workloads, thermal throttling might occur without the fan, though it's audible and has an annoyingly high pitch.

Non-reference designs from some manufacturers range from dual fans, as with the PNY XLR8 CS3150, to the MSI Spaptium M580’s elaborate hybrid cooling solution. There’s also the Patriot Viper VP573 with a low-profile blower design. Other drives, like the Sabrent Rocket 5, arrive bare or at least provide the option to purchase a bare drive, with the assumption that you will provide your own after-market solution. This could be cooling provided by the motherboard, or something like Thermalright’s HR-09 Pro.

One active but quiet SSD cooling solution we saw at CES 2024 was the AirJet Mini, which can be configured to cool PCIe 5.0 drives. Micron was showing off four Phison E26 drives running in RAID, which provided sustained read speeds of over 40 GB/s. More development in this area is anticipated.

While we are now very familiar with the Phison E26 controller, having reviewed over ten drives with capacities up to 4TB, it’s technically not the only PCIe 5.0 platform that will be made available. Phison revealed the E31T’s specifications at CES, but that hardware is not intended to compete at the high-end. For that we have SMI’s SM2508, demonstrated in the Adata Project NeonStorm SSD, and InnoGrit’s IG5666, shown in the Teamgroup T-Force GE Pro. The former is expected to use TSMC's 6nm process node and should usher in some thermal relief versus the current Phison E26 12nm designs. We expect to see the Maxio MAP1802 at some point, too, also at 6nm.

There are also hybrid PCIe 5.0 drives possible, as the Samsung 990 EVO will run in both x4 PCIe 4.0 and x2 PCIe 5.0 modes. Its listed performance puts it in line with budget PCIe 4.0 SSDs such as the WD Black SN770 or WD Blue SN580, IG5220-based drives like the Patriot P400, E21T-based like the Silicon Power UD90, and SM2269XT-based like the Solidigm P41 Plus. Some MAP1602 drives also fall into this category. The 990 EVO’s bandwidth is not sufficient to really put it into the PCIe 5.0 category, but it’s an interesting development that’s worth watching, particularly as a near-term solution for laptops.

Moving along, the Max14um reference design is double-sided in the M.2 2280-D2-M form factor with a maximum of four NAND flash packages. This form factor is designed for a maximum height of 3.5mm, excluding any heatsinks. The drive’s intended capacity range is currently up to 4TB, which is achieved with 32 dies but only 16CE (chip enabled), the same as with the 2TB configuration. This certainly leaves room for 8TB, but that will be a difficult capacity to achieve at this level of performance given the M.2 power limitations.

Phison Max14um Comparison products

With the Max14um we are mostly interested in how it performs against existing PCIe 5.0 SSDs, but we've included the Samsung 990 Pro PCIe 4.0 as a comparison point — a drive that we’ve also reviewed at 4TB. Current PCIe 5.0 drives all use the Phison E26 controller, but variants start with 10 GB/s drives like the Seagate FireCuda 540, Nextorage NE5N, Inland TD510, Corsair MP700, and Gigabyte Aorus Gen 5 10000. Newer drives perform at up to 12 GB/s and include the Crucial T700, which we reviewed separately at 4TB, Nextorage NN5Pro, Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 12000, and Adata Legend 970.

This is the first taste we've had of Phison E26 equipped with Micron 2400 MT/s NAND, and the only PCIe 5.0 drives currently shipping all have the same basic hardware. However, as noted above, we saw several PCIe 5.0 drives at CES 2024 using other controllers, so we could finally see some added competition in this segment in the near future.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we include details of that where possible.

The Max14um sets a record in 3DMark with the best scores to date. Its firmware is DirectStorage-optimized so drives built on it will be a beast for both current and future game titles. Overall performance is nearly 10% higher than the next closest E26 12 GB/s drive.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The Max14um sets new records in PCMark 10 as well, breaking the 1,000 MB/s bandwidth result for the first time with a single drive. Burst performance doesn’t get better than this, although the translation to real world applications is questionable. You need a high-end system with specific workloads to take advantage. 

DiskBench Transfer Rates

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive. Then we copy all of that data to a new folder, and follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This last test represents a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

The Max14um’s copy performance is unmatched. It gets an extra push from its higher bandwidth cap, but it’s not a huge amount better than drives like the T700 and NN5Pro. You will see a larger benefit in comparison to Gen 3 and Gen 4 SSDs.

We generally ignore the write transfer rate for now, as the source PCIe 4.0 drive can be a bottleneck. While we had a few drives hit 2.8 GB/s in previous testing, most drives now max out at 2.2–2.3 GB/s.

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths.

The Max14um performs as expected in ATTO, matching and the slightly exceeding other E26-based drives. It does push things a bit higher for sequential reads and writes at larger block sizes. QD1 sequential performance in CDM is not particularly impressive, but if you have multiple streams going on you will benefit from the extra bandwidth.

Random QD1 4KB latencies remain good, so there’s no trade-off here except against the 990 Pro in reads. Current and future 990 Pros will be using a later generation of Samsung flash which might level this matchup, as latency may be slightly worse for it, but the difference here is small enough not to worry.

Sustained Write and Temperatures

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for at least 15 minutes (we tested for 120 minutes on the Max14um) to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.

The 2TB Max14um sustains over 12 GB/s in pSLC mode with an SLC cache size matching the slower E26 rivals. Lower-end variants like the MP700 are just above 10 GB/s while the faster T700 is closer to 12 GB/s. While TLC performance has been pretty similar among the tested PCIe 5.0 drives, the Max14um manages to eke out 4 GB/s, which finally and definitively puts it above the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives. This is a very high-performance drive for larger sustained writes. It’s also nice that the drive can recover SLC while still providing solid TLC-mode performance.

We've also included a plot of the drive temperature over the course of our write saturation testing. You can see the Max14um peak at 74C, about 1,300 seconds into our stress test. Note that at this point, we've done roughly two complete drive writes to the SSD, so this isn't even remotely a real-world consumer workload.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

Power is one area where the E26 seems to have issues. The good news is that the higher performance achieved by the Max14um — which required a lot of fine-tuning to reach — does make the drive a bit more efficient. Idle power consumption is still disappointingly high, though. This drive is intended to be used in high-performance desktops so there’s a reasonable chance you can live with high idle draw. Officially, though, the drive is rated to pull less than 144mW in PS3 and less than 85mW in PS4 power modes.

Test Bench and Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Phison E26 Max14um Conclusion

The Max14um is simply the fastest SSD we’ve ever tested, and we gave Phison one of our Best of CES awards for moving the entire consumer storage industry forward. It’s not perfect, though: Our original complaints about power consumption and thermal output remain valid. It’s expected that a high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD will pull a lot of power, but idle desktop consumption remains high. Efficiency also leaves something to be desired, but we expect this will be cleared up in time with more efficient controllers and flash.

Part of that means needing a smaller process node as well as four-channel and DRAM-less designs, and part of it means iterative improvements to Micron’s flash. We’ve seen great things out of the Maxio MAP1602 combined with YMTC’s 232-Layer flash, so we know it’s possible. Even though Phison’s upcoming E31T won’t reach 14 GB/s, it’s likely to give excellent levels of performance with lower power use. With the E26 Max14um, we’re looking more at cutting-edge, early adopter hardware. That’s perfectly fine if you really want to push your storage.

There's also the question of capacity. We’ve only tested one E26 drive at 4TB and some manufacturers aren’t even planning to go that high. 8TB meanwhile is nowhere to be seen. Given that this controller needs at least 2TB to really stretch its legs, that means there’s a lot of competition at 1TB and also at 4TB and up. Solid PCIe 4.0 drives like the Samsung 990 Pro, Solidigm P44 Pro, and WD Black SN850X are probably the best bet at 1TB. The 990 Pro and SN850X are also excellent at 4TB, but if you just want capacity then drives like the Lexar NM790 remain a good value. That does leave a 14 GB/s monster as a bit niche.

We are nevertheless interested to see what will come out from various brands. Having more drives available is a net benefit and we hope for better cooling solutions, too. We don’t think that the thermal output of these drives is as bad as it first appears; it’s really more a matter of requiring a heatsink. This adds cost and potential complexity but in the grand scheme of things, it just means we will need more efficient drives for future laptops. DirectStorage adoption remains far enough away that you can wait this one out on desktop, unless you really want top tier storage performance today.

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Patriot demonstrated its upcoming flagship solid-state drive with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface at CES this week. The Viper PV573 SSD has a massive cooler with a blower fan, but Patriot says it can boast up to 14,000 MB/s sequential read speed and maintain a temperature of 45ºC due to the powerful cooling system.

Patriot's Viper PV573 SSD is powered by the Phison PS5026-E26 controller and Micron's B58R 3D TLC NAND with a 2400 MT/s data transfer rate. The drives will be available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, and the manufacturer says that they will offer a sequential read speed of up to 14,000 MB/s and a sequential write speed of up to 12,000 MB/s, which is in line with premium drives based on this Phison E26 platform from some other makers and enough to make it one of the best SSDs available.

What differentiates Patriot's Viper PV573 from the rest of the range-topping PCIe Gen5 drives in an M.2-2280 form factor is its cooling system featuring an aluminum radiator, a heatshield, and a blower fan. The heatshield ensures that the fan blows air through the heatsink, not just against the heatsink, which Patriot says guarantees an operating temperature of just 45ºC. Such a relatively low temperature means that the drive will not throttle under high loads due to overheating.

Meanwhile, the cooling system is pretty large: it has a 16.5 mm z-height and requires and external power (which is why Patriot uses a cable with a SATA and four-pin Molex plug). The good news is that the blower fan design is rated at 25,000 hours, or two years and 10 months.

Patriot says that the Viper PV573 SSD will be available in 2024 and does not mention pricing. However, we would expect it to be close to release and be priced in line with other premium PCIe Gen5 SSDs. 

Finally, SSDs that can use the full PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot bandwidth are on their way. Phison calls the new reference design “Max14um,” though retail products are free to deviate from what Phison has put together. This gives us a preview of what we can expect to see from various Phison partners next year, and it will certainly power some of the best SSDs once such drives go on sale.

We'll have a preview of Phison's Max14um reference design in the coming days. It's an optimized version of SSDs based on the popular E26 controller, and we expect plenty of SSD partners will show off similar hardware at CES 2024 in January. SSD models capable of hitting 14 GB/s (which is where the Max14 part of the name comes from if that wasn't clear), like the Sabrent Rocket 5, have been detailed throughout 2023 with multiple updates to track their progress. The fastest E26 drives we’ve tested to date — the Crucial T700, Teamgroup Z540, and Nextorage NN5Pro for example — have had a throughput ceiling of around 12.4 GB/s.

Once we get drives that can break 14 GB/s, the only viable ways to go much faster will be with a wider interface like PCIe 5.0 x8, using multiple drives in RAID, or we'll need to wait for PCIe 6.0 platforms and devices to start showing up. PCIe 5.0 x4 offers a theoretical 32 GT/s speed and tops out at 15.75 GB/s. However, there's usually other overhead involved, so 14 GB/s is very close to the real-world maximum. (For reference, the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives we've tested have peaked at around 7.15 GB/s, even though the theoretical maximum is 7.88 GB/s.)

While Max14um utilizes existing hardware, critical optimizations were required to reach and maintain the highest speeds possible in a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot. The current M.2 form factor can handle up to 0.5A for each of nine 3.3V power pins — theoretically 14.85W total — but the maximum M-key power output is capped at a more reasonable 11.55W average by PCI-SIG, with higher burst power allowed for very short periods. We’ve already touched beyond 12W peak in our testing, so this is a limit Phison has certainly bumped up against. With careful engineering and design, Phison has persevered to enable faster drives with additional customizations available to retail partners.

These partners can choose their own optimizations and features, such as support for encryption or specific thermal throttling points, with customizable firmware. We expect individual partners to stand out with unique heatsinks and model names at the very least — and please skip the tiny little fan. Performance will vary from platform to platform and drive to drive, but SSDs similar in specs to the Max14um prototype should be the fastest on record. This includes enhanced support for upcoming technologies that are still maturing, with a DirectStorage performance target that’s about double of what is currently achievable on PCIe 4.0 drives like the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G.

We expect good things from Phison’s design and will be taking a look at it early next year. We’ll also be looking at what Phison’s partners bring to the table with unique optimizations and, later, enhanced and mature firmware. Cooling will certainly become of greater importance as performance is pushed to the edge. 14 GB/s is quite an achievement given the constraints of current hardware and we look forward to finally seeing DirectStorage-capable software that’s able to make use of this horsepower.

Memory makers are witnessing increasing prices as production reductions lead to price rises in both DRAM and NAND segments. Companies like Adata, Phison, and Winbond are experiencing improved revenues in September and Q3, with an overall positive future outlook, reports UDN.com.

The memory industry is seeing positive growth, especially after production cuts by leading makers such as Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix. Phison, a leading developer of SSD controllers and a supplier of actual drives, has reported an increase in September revenues, achieving NT$50.04 billion ($1.557 billion). This is a 25.38% monthly increase and a 4.05% yearly increment, marking a 14-month high. The company's Q3 earnings also showed an encouraging 24% quarter-over-quarter growth, despite a year-over-year drop of 15%. Cumulatively, Phison's revenue for the first three quarters was down by 32%, standing at NT$324.74 billion ($10.1 billion).

Adata, leveraging both the production benefits and the recovery of DRAM and NAND prices, presented remarkable figures. The company's September revenue landed at NT$14.82 billion ($461.2 million), which is a monthly increase of 16.47% and an impressive annual growth of 113.10%. Adata's Q3 revenue amounted to NT$36.48 billion ($1.135 billion), with a 35.5% decline from the previous quarter but a significant 116.33% yearly spike. Their earnings for the first three quarters were great, too: at NT$108.72 billion ($3.383 billion), it indicated a 119.22% yearly increase, setting unprecedented highs.

Optimism surrounds the fourth quarter as well, especially for Adata. The company aims to capitalize on upcoming major shopping events like Singles' Day and Christmas. With plans to meld online and offline sales strategies, they are poised for an even more profitable season, according to the report. Furthermore, Adata's leader, Chen Libai, has highlighted signs of industry revival and anticipates DRAM and NAND Flash contract prices to ascend by 10%-15%. He believes that both spot and contract rates for these memory components will sustain this upward trajectory.

Winbond, a producer of memory focused primarily on specialty memory, also faces rejuvenated customer demand. Their financials for September showcased a revenue of NT$ 67.66 billion ($2.1 billion), reflecting a 5.32% growth from the previous month and a 7.96% decline year-over-year. The company's quarterly earnings for Q3 amounted to NT$ 195.06 billion ($6.07 billion), a rise of 3.69% from the previous quarter and a drop of 11.92% compared to the previous year. The total revenue accumulated over the first three quarters was NT$ 558.32 billion ($17.375 billion), marking a 25.86% annual decrease.

August 25, 2023 Update: We've added new testing for the 2TB PNY XLR8 CS3140 SSD on page 2.

Original Review published June 22, 2022:

PNY has been around for a long time, known in particular for its flash-based products, but also for its memory and GPUs. The company's new XLR8 CS3140 SSD tops out at 7,500/6,850 MBps of sequential read/write throughput for the 2TB and larger models, and it's also flexible in that it has both a version with a heatsink and one without, and you can also use a separate PlayStation 5 heatsink for the latter. 

Last year, PNY reduced the endurance rating on its CS3030 SSD by almost 80% due to the impact of Chia cryptomining, which was known for killing SSDs with heavy write workloads. But PNY has now returned to high endurance ratings with the XLR8 CS3140.

We tested the new 1TB XLR8 CS3140 model, which is a good starting capacity, but the 2TB model offers better peak performance because it is packed with more flash dies. Naturally, the 4TB is even more compelling if you're after more raw capacity. However, a basic primary drive is quite fine at 1TB, especially when coupled with strong hardware and a good SLC caching scheme like we see with the previous-gen CS3140. Let's see how the PNY CS3140 fares in our test suite. 

Specifications

The PNY CS3140 is available in the 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. These all have a five-year warranty backed up by 700TBW, 1400TBW, and 3000TBW of write endurance, respectively. Performance tops out at 7,500/6,850 MBps of sequential read/write throughput for the 2TB and larger models.

PNY doesn't officially list the IOPS measurements, but we can guess that this drive would be similar to other SSDs that have the same hardware combination. We had to dig up the endurance numbers on PNY's Taiwanese site, and the company seems to operate on the principle of “the less the information, the better.” That does make some sense in an era where SSD manufacturers often change the SSD's hardware after launch, but you'll need to do your homework to find concrete specs for these drives.  

The drive supports 256-bit AES encryption. PNY sells this drive with and without a heatsink, and we are testing the version without. This makes it a good choice for the PlayStation 5, possibly as-is, but PNY sells a separate heatsink for SSDs that is designed especially for the PS5. 

Software and Accessories

The CS3140 doesn't come with anything special. PNY does offer a download for its PCIe SSD toolbox software for firmware updating on their site. This software also gives some basic information about the drive, such as SMART readings, and allows for secure erasing.

A Closer Look

The drive is quite plain, sporting a rear label with basic details about the drive. Under the top label, we see the controller, DRAM, and four NAND packages in a standard configuration.

The flash is labeled IA7BG94AYA, which is 176-layer Micron TLC, a.k.a. B47R. This flash has proven excellent when coupled with the Phison E18 controller. As there are four packages, each should have four 64GB flash dies in a QDP configuration.

Based on data pulled from the drive, this flash is standard B47R running at 1200 MT/s. We’ve seen faster, but this is sufficient with two dies per channel. The endurance and quality of the flash look good, so there are no surprises here.

The Phison E18 controller needs no introduction - it’s been used on a wide variety of drives to good effect. It tends to be optimized for peak performance, specifically in sequential work, and it’s particularly good when paired with newer flash.

The DRAM is SK hynix’s H5AN8G6NCJR-VKC, which is 1GB of DDR4 in the 512M x 16b configuration. This would be C-die DRAM with the normal DRAM-to-NAND ratio, more than enough for any user. We can also spot the Phison power management package (PMIC) near the controller.

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Comparison Products

There are some new drives out on the market that weren’t here when we reviewed the 1TB CS3140, including PCIe 5.0 SSDs like the Crucial T700 and Corsair MP700. We also have reviewed some great 4.0 SSDs like the Samsung 990 Pro, the Solidigm P44 Pro/SK hynix Platinum P41, and the WD Black SN850X. There’s also the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G and Adata Legend 960 Max. Lastly, we have the budget-oriented Solidigm P41 Plus. Keep in mind that we got the PS5 heatsink with the 2TB CS3140 which makes it great for the PS5 even if the drive is dated in standard benchmarks.

A Closer Look

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The CS3140 is below average in 3DMark. It scored slightly worse than the 1TB version.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The CS3140 is near the bottom in PCMark 10, too, faring worse than the 1TB version.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

Things aren’t quite as bad with DiskBench. The CS3140 is close enough to the other high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs. The 5.0 SSDs - the T700 and MP700 - pull away due to their faster interface, while the slower P41 Plus is at the bottom.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The CS3140’s sequential performance in ATTO and CDM is adequate but not on the level of the better PCIe 4.0 SSDs. This is fine as sequential performance at this level isn’t super important. Random write latency is good — surprisingly good even, but random read latency is fairly bad and significantly worse than the 1TB version of this drive.

The reason for that is obvious; PNY switched to 112-Layer Kioxia TLC (BiCS5) which does not perform as well with this controller as the original 176-Layer Micron TLC (B47R). However, if you’re buying a drive for capacity and especially for the PS5, this is not a big deal.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The 2TB CS3140 writes in pSLC mode for over 30 seconds at up to 6.2 GB/s. This makes for a cache over 200GB, which is fairly large. Luckily, the drive does not easily hit a folding state, and instead drops to around 1.6 GB/s in TLC mode. This is not a bad result in any way. The 1TB version with Micron TLC is faster in TLC mode and it would probably be even faster with more dies at 2TB. Still, the BiCS5 2TB CS3140 is fairly consistent. Its recovery response has it lingering in TLC mode, which is luckily not too bad.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a 24C ambient.

The 2TB CS3140 with BiCS5 flash is not very efficient, especially compared to similar drives using Micron’s TLC instead. This is to be expected as this flash is less efficient in general and does not seem to pair quite as well with Phison’s E18 controller. This result isn’t crtical if this drive is used in a high-end desktop or PS5, but it does demonstrate the downsides of swapping the flash. It’s worth pointing out that other manufacturers can and have changed hardware over the course of an SSD’s lifespan.

We only reached a brief maximum of 67C during testing, which is far away from significant throttling. This drive would be quite happy in a PS5 with the optional heatsink. We would recommend it for that or perhaps some extra fast storage if the drive is priced right. Right now, at the time of the review update, the 2TB SN850X is probably the better option.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

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PNY XLR8 CS3140 1TB SSD

RATING: ★★★★ (4 Stars)

PROS

+ Consistent performance
+ Strong peak and all-around performance
+ Power-efficient
+ Good PlayStation 5 option from PNY

CONS

- Pricing

OUR VERDICT
The 1TB PNY CS3140 is a solid drive that can be used in a PC or in the PlayStation 5, but the latter is best with PNY’s separate PS5 heatsink. Performance is strong, but there’s not much special about this drive versus the competition.

Comparison Products (1TB)

We compared the PNY CS3140 to other PCIe 4.0 drives, including the more budget-oriented WD Black SN770. Contenders using proprietary controllers include the WD Black SN850, the Samsung 980 Pro, and the Crucial P5 Plus. The other three drives use the same Phison E18 controller, but the Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 7000s and Corsair MP600 Pro use the older 96-layer Micron TLC while the last one, the Kingston Fury Renegade, is equipped with the same 176-layer flash as the CS3140.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

3DMark shows off WD’s excellent optimization, but thanks to their upgraded flash, we also had respectable results for the CS3140 and Fury Renegade.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Again we see strong optimization from WD and Crucial, with the newer flash helping out the CS3140 and Fury Renegade. PCMark is often considered a “real world” benchmark, and we can look particularly at the latency results to see that the older 96-layer flash on the 7000s and MP600 Pro is appreciably slower.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

This bandwidth-heavy test favors the high-end PCIe 4.0 drives, particularly those based on the Phison E18 controller. The newer 176-layer flash also brings improvements, particularly as we are testing at 1TB rather than 2TB of capacity. The Phison E18 can peak with 32 dies of flash, and considering these use 64GB dies, that means 2TB. The 176-layer flash is also faster per die than the 96-layer flash for copying tasks.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The queue depth 1 (QD1) sequential read and write results from ATTO paint a simple picture: drives using the Phison E18 come out on top, with a significant edge given to those with the newer 176-layer flash. To some extent, there is a “wall” due to the limits of the x4 PCIe 4.0 interface, as seen with queue depth 8 sequential reads in CrystalDiskMark. The write result shows a bit more delineation between the tested drives. At this point, we see a theme, with the CS3140 underperforming the Fury Renegade, possibly due to inferior firmware optimization.

Random QD1 performance is good to excellent on the CS3140, where we again see the newer flash pulling ahead. Again, no real surprises, which is not a bad thing — this hardware configuration performs very well on multiple fronts.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The CS3140 writes at above 5.8 GBps for almost 20 seconds, revealing an SLC cache of around 116GB. This is not a particularly large cache but should be more than sufficient for a 1TB SSD. The drive then hits its direct-to-TLC phase at up to 2 GBps, which is quite fast for a 1TB drive. This reflects the choice of having a smaller SLC cache while using the faster 176-layer TLC. Performance would be higher at 2TB due to additional interleaving. As the cache is dynamic, it will shrink as the drive is filled. It’s still possible to hit a slower state with sufficient writing, but this is difficult to achieve.

Beyond flash choice, the size of the cache is one thing that separates drives based on the E18 controller. As we can see here with the Fury Renegade’s results, it has a larger, faster cache than the CS3140, but no middle-ground TLC state — this allows some flexibility for the manufacturer and the user. While cache recovery remained slow on both drives, the CS3140's ability to maintain TLC speeds ensures it has better steady state performance for edge cases.

Which is better is arguable, particularly as high-end PCIe 4.0 drives tend to focus on raw bandwidth. However, we believe in the future that sustained performance may become more important. For example, if you’re able to stream assets steadily from a drive via DirectStorage. That would be reads and not writes, of course, but there are nevertheless cases where consistency trumps peak performance alone.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Remember that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature

Efficiency remains strong on the CS3140, thanks to the flash and the ability to quickly finish workloads with high peak performance. It still trails the Fury Renegade by a small bit.

According to both SMART and the IR gun, the CS3140 idles in the mid-40Cs and peaks in the upper-70Cs. This is hot but not unexpected as the drive lacks a heatsink. The smaller SLC cache helps when the drive hits the TLC flash, but sustained writes still get it pretty close to the throttling mark. In fact, we did see light throttling after about 215GB of writes when the drive hit 78C. Therefore, we recommend a heatsink if you anticipate having heavier workloads and/or a hotter environment.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

We didn't expect any surprises, and we didn't find any — the PNY XLR8 CS3140 gets close to our performance expectations without any weirdness. As with similar drives, the peak and general performance ranges from good to excellent. The SLC caching scheme is conservative, making for consistent performance in sustained workloads, and the new flash ensures good power efficiency. The PNY CS3140 is also a strong choice for a PlayStation 5 drive due to its option for a tailored heatsink.

On the other hand, there’s not much to set this drive apart from the competition. It is nice to see a functioning SSD toolbox — this is something lacking with, say, Inland drives — but the pricing isn’t particularly competitive. That being said, this is an adequate alternative and would be a good choice if you can find it on sale. PNY isn't pulling any endurance shenanigans here as far as we could tell, even if the company is a bit shy about some of the drive's specifications.

We scored the Kingston Fury Renegade a bit higher. The Fury Renegade edges out the CS3140 in almost every test while coming with cloning software, although currently, it is more expensive. The Kingston SSD is also designed for the PlayStation 5 and is perhaps a more trusted brand, perhaps except for those users who remember the ancient NAND switch-a-roo.

We also previously reviewed the Silicon Power XS70, a similar drive that's also designed for the PlayStation 5. It costs less than the CS3140 and comes with a PS5-capable heatsink out of the box. All of this makes it hard to give the PNY XLR8 CS3140 a higher score, but it is still a strong drive and contender. The biggest challenge for the XLR8 CS3140 is that it's in an increasingly crowded market, but it is a competent alternative.

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Corsair has a habit of bringing out their versions of SSDs a bit later than the competition, as we saw with the MP600 GS, and the same is true with the MP600 Mini following behind Sabrent’s Rocket 2230. There’s nothing wrong with nailing the right hardware in a price-competitive alternative with a targeted capacity and a name brand behind it. The MP600 Mini is designed to hit that popular 1TB capacity point without any frills to get in your way — just an easy upgrade for your Steam Deck and other portable systems. 

The Corsair MP600 Mini is the most efficient M.2 2230 SSD that we have tested to date, and it also delivers excellent all-around performance. It’s not using any special hardware, but it's a solid choice to upgrade your Steam Deck or ROG Ally to 1TB of fast internal storage. It manages to do this at a good price for a TLC option, although the 1TB QLC S91 is currently more than $10 less expensive. If you need to save more money or want additional storage, you have to go elsewhere, though, as the MP600 Mini only comes in a 1TB option.

Corsair is a known name brand, so the MP600 Mini is a safer bet than many of the random M.2 2230 SSDs. It’s equivalent to Inland’s TN446 and Sabrent’s Rocket 2230. Having more options is a good thing as it helps bring down prices. These three drives are the best options at this capacity, so feel free to go with the brand you trust or grab the least expensive one. There’s little not to recommend about the MP600 Mini otherwise.

Specifications

The Corsair MP600 Mini is available only in 1TB, costing $99.99. This undercuts similar drives like the Inland TN446 and Sabrent Rocket 2230 by about $10, but pricing has been shifting over time on all three drives, so keep your eyes open. The MP600 Mini is rated for up to 4,800 / 4,800 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and 850K / 1.1M random read and write IOPS. The IOPS ratings are unusually high for this hardware and should not be taken as meaning the drive is actually faster than its peers. Corsair warranties the drive for 600TB of writes over five years. 

Software and Accessories

Corsair offers a download for its SSD Toolbox software on its site. This application displays drive information and SMART health attributes, plus it allows you to TRIM, clone, overprovision, or securely erase the drive.

A Closer Look

The MP600 Mini is an M.2 2230 form factor SSD with an SSD controller, a single NAND package, a PMIC, and no DRAM. The drive is single-sided for optimal compatibility. There are no embellishments.

The MP600 Mini comes with the familiar Phison E21T SSD controller and Micron’s 176-Layer TLC (B47R). This flash uses 512Gb or 64GB dies, so it requires 16 dies (HDP), which is the effective limit. The E21T has proven to be a reliable performer with good power efficiency, making it a good choice over many other solutions on the market. 

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Comparison Products

The Corsair MP600 Mini is up against other M.2 2230 SSDs that we have tested, including the similar Rocket 2230, the Addlink S91, the older Inland TN436, the newer Inland TN446, and the Sabrent Rocket Q4 2230. This covers the most current and relevant retail options, with the Team MP44S on the way. The WD SN740, not compared, should be treated as a WD Black SN770. The Micron 2400, for its part, is similar to the Crucial P3 Plus but with an SMI controller. These two drives will be referred to where applicable but are not explicitly reviewed as they are built for OEMs. 

Steam Deck Benchmarks - General

To gauge general Steam Deck performance, we engage in a variety of typical storage situations with active time measurement. These activities include dealing with the default SteamOS through initial setup, re-imaging, initial booting, and booting in general. For game testing, we see how long it takes to install and boot the popular title Hollow Knight. For a full explanation of our testing procedure, see our Steam Deck storage testing article.

The MP600 Mini performs within the expected envelope, although, on the whole, it’s not quite as fast as the Rocket 2230. You would be excused for thinking there’s not much point in getting worked up over a second or two here and there. These tests do show a significant improvement over the stock 64GB drive, which is to be expected. The stock 256GB and 512GB drives would also be somewhat slower than our tested drives, but you won't notice in normal operation if you’re not checking a stopwatch.

However, after some writes and wear, performance over time could be different, especially with a fuller drive. It’s also worth considering efficiency as a newer drive like the MP600 Mini may pull less power over the device's lifetime, which could impact battery wear and lifespan. If you’re the type to reinstall the OS twenty times, multi-boot Windows, and engage in other experiments, there’s value in getting a high-performance SSD with TLC.

Steam Deck Benchmarks - KDiskMark and Temperature

One of the most popular, if not the most popular, storage benchmarks is CrysalDiskMark (CDM), which we use in our Windows-based SSD testing suite. This benchmark relies on Microsoft’s DiskSpd with templated test settings. CDM lets you quickly see how a drive performs against its idealized, rated specifications, and the benchmark can also hint at a more “real world” feel with low queue depth I/O testing.

The Linux flavor of this benchmark, which is easy to install on the Steam Deck, is KDiskMark. The “K” refers to the KDE desktop environment used on the Deck. KDiskMark relies on the Flexible I/O tester, or FIO, instead of DiskSpd. For the temperature portion, we use data from the SMART sensors on the drive, which can be directly polled and from which the maximum temperature can be extracted.

The MP600 Mini’s KDiskMark performance is adequate to good. Read performance at low queue depth remains an important result, whether sequential or random, as it correlates with “real world” feel, which includes game and app loading times to a smaller degree. This is more noticeable in some cases than others, although the difference suggested here is not huge. It’s worth upgrading from the stock drive for both performance and capacity, but it might not be worth upgrading from the TN436 for performance alone if you happen to already have one - depending on how you use your Deck.

The MP600 Mini’s temperature is within reason, coming in six degrees cooler than the TN436. It runs a lot hotter than the stock drive, but that makes sense, given the limited capacity and performance of the 64GB eMMC original.

PC Trace Testing - 3DMark Gaming Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The MP600 Mini comes out near the top, matching the TN446 and Rocket 2230. It performs better than the QLC-based S91 and Rocket Q4 2230 and much better than the older TN436. Latency is somewhat improved in PCIe 4.0 mode.

PC Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The QLC drives do better in PCMark 10, but the MP600 Mini’s score is not bad by any means. The QLC drives have massive pSLC caches compared to the restrained ones on the TLC drives, which can have interesting impacts on performance. One advantage of a large cache is that the drive can retain some data in pSLC for later reading, which makes more sense on a QLC drive as the native read latency is higher than pSLC and TLC. 

PC Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The DiskBench results are predictable with the TLC drives, including the MP600 Mini, pulling away in PCIe 4.0 mode. In PCIe 3.0 mode, the drives perform very similarly. This does imply that a QLC drive would work well with the Steam Deck for this type of workload, while the ROG Ally can eke out more storage performance.

PC Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

ATTO performance is good to excellent with the MP600 Mini, as anticipated. Sequential performance in CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is also good to great compared to the competition. In PCIe 4.0 mode, the TLC drives, like the MP600 Mini, pull away during sequential write workloads. Noticeably, the TLC drives have significantly better 4KB read latency, which is an important result. Real-world impact is probably not large, but the difference is there.

PC Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. 

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The MP600 Mini writes at its maximum speed for over 20 seconds in both PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 modes. In the former, its pSLC cache is similar in size to the TN446 and Rocket 2230 at around 70GB. In the latter, it appears to be larger, closer to 100GB, as it is writing for the same amount of time but at a higher speed without the restriction of a PCIe 3.0 interface. This does not impact the average write performance, with steady state performance and TLC mode at about 1.8 GB/s. The different cache does have implications for the MP600 Mini’s use in the PCIe 4.0 ROG Ally, but the impact should be small.

The drive can maintain relatively decent performance in its TLC mode and can afford to take some time to recover its pSLC. The QLC drives rely more on pSLC and, with their large caches, must recover more quickly.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a 24C ambient.

The MP600 Mini is the most efficient M.2 2230 SSD that we’ve tested to date. It manages to edge out the Rocket 2230 and TN446, with the QLC drives further behind. The older TN436 is in another zip code.

In normal testing, the MP600 Mini topped out at around 53C. You would have to engage in sustained writes to get it up towards throttling temperatures around 80C. The drive does run slightly cooler on average in PCIe 3.0 mode, but it’s likely to be hot in both the Steam Deck and ROG Ally due to their tight environments. There is a valid link between power draw and heat dissipation, and while this hardware is fast, the peak power draw is still quite reasonable.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

We have nothing bad to say about the MP600 Mini, except maybe that we’d like to see more. 1TB is the most popular capacity for an M.2 2230 upgrade, particularly on the Steam Deck, so it makes sense that Corsair focused on hitting that point. TLC works well at that capacity for maximum performance, and this hardware is quite efficient, to boot. Currently, Corsair can sell this drive at a lower price than the competition, so this strategy works well. If you need 256GB, we recommend the Rocket 2230; at 512GB, we recommend the TN446, and at 2TB, the Rocket Q4 2230 or S91.

Many other options are on the market, including the Solidigm P41 Plus, the WD SN740, and the Micron 2400. These are all technically OEM drives. We would expect none to be as efficient as the drives based on the Phison E21T with Micron flash, whether TLC or QLC. However, they are all viable options if you can get them at a lower price. On the other hand, we would recommend against older drives, including the TN436 and other Kioxia BG5 clones. Generically-branded drives may or may not have newer hardware, but support will likely be limited for them anyway, so they should be considered a last resort - especially if you’re buying from a marketplace like AliExpress.

All in all, the MP600 Mini is a solid all-around drive. You can buy it without worry. It’s easy to get, and it’s priced right. Corsair knew what they were doing when they targeted this drive, although we would like to see even more options in this space.

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Phison has demonstrated its what it claims to be the fastest client solid-state drive released to date: the PS5026-E26 Max14um Gen5 SSD with an over 14 GB/s sequential read speed, which is higher than what the best SSDs offer today, at Flash Memory Summit 2023. The unit was cooled down using an innovative system from Frore.

Phison and its partners were first to offer SSDs based on the PS5026-E26 controller with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. Those drives significantly outperformed all SSDs that existed at the time, even though they could not demonstrate their full potential due to scarce availability of 3D NAND with a 2,400 MT/s interface. By now, Micron has finally managed to ramp up production of its fastest 3D NAND devices and Phison can demonstrates its PS5026-E26 Max14um Gen5 SSD featuring a sequential write speed of over 14 GB/s. 

As PCIe Gen5 SSDs based on controllers from Innogrit and Silicon Motion are getting closer, Phison wants to remind people that its platform can pack quite a punch, which is why it built an SSD based on its PC5026-E26 controller and Micron's B58R 3D TLC NAND memory chips that can hit a 14,175 MB/s sequential read speed and a 12,471 MB/s sequential write speed as well as 1.79 million random read IOPS and 1.74 million random write IOPS. 

Performance offered by the PS5026-E26 Max14um Gen5 SSD is a bit higher than sequential performance of enterprise-grade PCIe Gen5 drives and even higher than what Sabrent achieved with its E26-based drive a month ago. To hit such read/write speeds, Phison had to tweak firmware and cool down its drive properly. To do so, Phison used Frore Systems's AirJet Mini cooling system that uses tiny vibrating membrane to generate airflow.

For now, Phison does not disclose whether it plans to offer its partners reference designs of its PS5026-E26 Max14um Gen5 SSD, or just let them achieve similar performance levels themselves, though it is logical to expect SSD makers to offer another generation of E26-based SSDs in light of the fact that there are PCIe Gen5 drives featuring different controllers incoming.

The Inland TN446 1TB SSD has landed on our test bench. Inland, Micro Center’s house or generic SSD brand, has made a name for itself with solid SSDs like the Gaming Performance Plus. It has even had some firsts with the PCIe 5.0 TD510 and the M.2 2230 TN436, and the latter was a popular pick to upgrade launch Steam Decks. Inland is now back with the newer TN446 to improve the formula with a drive you can easily pick up and install into your favorite portable system. That’s never been easier to do with the growing list of 2230 SSDs on the market, but for those with access to a Micro Center, the TN446 may be especially worthy of interest. 

The TN446 supersedes the older TN436, which we didn't like as much because it performed poorly and was inefficient. The newer drive is far better, designed similarly to the Sabrent Rocket 2230 4.0 - or just Rocket 2230 - and the Corsair MP600 Mini. It uses TLC flash instead of the QLC on the Sabrent Rocket Q4 2230 and Addlink S91. And while the Rocket 2230 has a 256GB option, the TN436 does not.

The Inland TN436 is a welcome addition to the roster of retail M.2 2230 NVMe SSDs, perfect for upgrading the internal storage of your Steam Deck or ASUS ROG Ally. It joins a growing list of options with enough competition to drive prices down to reasonable levels. It has Inland’s typical six-year warranty, which is nice, but it lacks a software management suite. Luckily, there are free applications available. The drive performs well enough and efficiently enough to be a good choice if it’s priced right, and it's particularly attractive at the 512GB capacity point. Let's take a closer look. 

Specifications

The Inland TN446 is available in 512GB and 1TB capacities at $49.99 and $109.99, respectively, at the time of review. The smaller capacity option declined by $10 during writing, so pricing will vary, but that makes the drive compelling at that specific capacity. The 1TB model is probably the most popular, though, and its price is matched or bettered by the Corsair MP600 Mini and Sabrent Rocket 2230, so you have options.

The TN446 can push up to 4,900 MB/s / 3,700 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 900K / 600K random read and write IOPS. Inland warranties the drives for six years and up to 600TB of writes per TB of capacity. The extra year of warranty is one place where Inland drives stand out, but it’s not as big a bonus with this type of drive as failures seem to come earlier in the expected host devices.

Software and Accessories

Inland generally does not include software or offer software downloads for its SSDs. We recommend using free, third-party applications for cloning and imaging. Diagnostics and SMART monitoring can also be done with free software like CrystalDiskInfo. 

A Closer Look

There’s not much to these tiny drives. This M.2 2230 form factor SSD has an SSD controller, a single NAND package, and a PMIC. The drive is single-sided, and Inland’s presentation is bereft of any frills. 

The TN446 utilizes the Phison E21T controller, a popular and powerful option for both TLC and QLC flash. The single flash package is labeled ICCIG94AYA, which is 8Tb or 1TB of Micron’s 176-Layer TLC (B47R). This hardware combination is popular with budget PCIe 4.0 drives, including the M.2 2230 Rocket 2230 and MP600 Mini.

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Comparison Products

The Inland TN446 faces other M.2 2230 SSDs that we have tested, including the 1TB Rocket 2230, the Corsair MP600 Mini, the older Inland TN436, the Sabrent Rocket Q4 2230, and the Addlink S91. These are the most popular retail drives that are or will be available. The WD SN740 is basically a shorter Black SN770, so we refer you to that review for now.

We have two series of tests below, with the first two series of tests conducted in the Steam Deck, while the remainder are on our standard PC test bench in Windows 11.

Steam Deck Benchmarks - General

To gauge general Steam Deck performance, we engage in a variety of typical storage situations with active time measurement. These activities include dealing with the default SteamOS through initial setup, re-imaging, initial booting, and booting in general. For game testing, we see how long it takes to install and boot the popular title Hollow Knight. For a full explanation of our testing procedure, see our Steam Deck storage testing article.

The TN446 proved slightly slower than expected when re-imaging the Steam Deck. Three seconds isn’t a lot, but it could indicate a firmware or optimization difference in the drives. 

Given the performance inconsistencies we see below during sustained write workloads, the flash on our sample may be of a different quality than usual. We witnessed this in other reviews with the Team Group A440 Pro and, more recently, with the Netac NV7000. In general, this should not be taken to represent all drives of a given model but rather a random variance, possibly from early samples.

Steam Deck Benchmarks - KDiskMark and Temperature

One of the most popular, if not the most popular, storage benchmarks is CrysalDiskMark (CDM), which we use in our Windows-based SSD testing suite. This benchmark relies on Microsoft’s DiskSpd with templated test settings. CDM lets you quickly see how a drive performs against its idealized, rated specifications, and the benchmark can also hint at a more “real world” feel with low queue depth I/O testing.

The Linux flavor of this benchmark, which is easy to install on the Steam Deck, is KDiskMark. The “K” refers to the KDE desktop environment used on the Deck. KDiskMark relies on the Flexible I/O tester, or FIO, instead of DiskSpd. For the temperature portion, we use data from the SMART sensors on the drive, which can be directly polled and from which the maximum temperature can be extracted.

The TN446 doesn’t perform as well as it should in KDiskMark. It falls somewhat behind the similar Rocket 2230 and MP600 Mini. It’s not completely unusual for generically-branded SSDs to have performance anomalies, either due to firmware or, in some cases, flash differences. Normally the latter is spotted in the write saturation test, and we did see that above. The real-world impact may not be large, but it could be a factor in your buying decision if the drive is priced the same as the competition.

The TN446 doesn’t run unusually hot, but it’s still the warmest of the drives we’ve tested, aside from the older TN436.

PC Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities, including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

Here we switch to our PC test system, with two series of results. The first series in the album has the drive tested with a PCIe 3.0 connection to emulate the connection speed in the Steam Deck, while the second series contains results with a PCIe 4.0 connection. We'll use this same approach for the remainder of our tests. 

The TN446 is right up there with the best in 3DMark, particularly at PCIe 4.0 speeds. 

PC Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The TN446 is merely average in PCMark 10, but it matches the Rocket 2230 and MP600 Mini in this throughput-intensive workload.

PC Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

All of these drives, aside from the older TN436, fare about the same in DiskBench when limited to PCIe 3.0 speeds. The TLC-based drives do better with PCIe 4.0, although not massively so.

PC Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that storage vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

All of the drives tested, aside from the TN436, do quite well in ATTO. This is typical for SSDs powered by the Phison E21T SSD controller. Results are also good for sequential performance in CDM. With sequential writes, however, the QLC-based drives will fall behind when the interface is opened up to 4.0. Random 4KB read performance is also best on the TLC drives, which include the TN446.

PC Sustained Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. 

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The TN446 writes at about 4.6 GB/s in pSLC mode for around 14 seconds, making for a cache capacity of over 65GB. The intermediate TLC state writes at over 1.7 GB/s before leveling to an average above 800 MB/s as it hits an inconsistent steady state that drops to about 400 MB/s when folding. This is considerably less consistent than on the Rocket 2230 and MP600 Mini. 

When run at PCIe 3.0, the pattern is similar with a lower maximum pSLC speed. Generally speaking, performance will recover to TLC speeds after some idle time.

PC Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a 24C ambient.

The TN446 is a small amount less efficient than its TLC peers in both PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 modes. It remains better than the QLC options. That said, any of these drives would work great, aside from the older TN436.

The TN446 hit a maximum temperature of 67C during DiskBench, well below throttling, when run at PCIe 4.0. This is a realistic workload, but within the confines of a ROG Ally, the temperature will be higher. Things may be somewhat better on the 3.0 Deck, but sustained writes will probably lead to throttling in either case. Cooling options are limited on these devices, unfortunately, but this drive does not run hotter than the alternatives.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

We also use a stock Steam Deck for our in-Deck testing.

Conclusion

The Inland TN446 isn't exceptional in any of the key metrics, but it is a competent drive that is more than capable of being an excellent internal storage upgrade for your embedded and portable devices. The TN446 largely performs within expectations, but it often isn't quite as good as its identical peers. Specifically, it has uneven results during sustained write workloads and in-the-Deck testing.

More M.2 2230 SSDs are becoming available in retail every day, which is a good thing as it drives prices down. These types of drives used to be expensive or could only be easily purchased after being pulled from an OEM device.

Places like Framework and iFixit eventually offered drives, including the WD SN740 and Micron 2400, with warranties to the wider masses, although it was possible to find these drives in other places before this year. The WD SN740 is very similar to the SN770, a drive that’s an excellent performer. However, it’s less efficient, and performance also drops off a little at 2TB, making QLC drives potentially a better option, especially if they’re less expensive. QLC contenders include the Micron 2400.

This leaves TLC options for the 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacity points. The Sabrent Rocket 2230 has all of these covered, but the Corsair MP600 Mini is only available at 1TB. The Inland TN446 threads this needle with both 512GB and 1TB, the two most popular capacity options.

Inland lacks a 256GB or 2TB option for M.2 2230, which makes the TN446 less flexible, particularly as the older TN436 is basically left out in the cold. On the bright side, this means the TN446 is easily compared to those other two drives, although we saw some inconsistency in testing. It’s priced well at 512GB right now, making it a solid option, but it will have to come down in order to be a worthwhile alternative at 1TB.

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The Netac NV7000 is a passable PCIe 4.0 SSD that could work in a desktop PC or especially a PlayStation 5, but unlike the drives on our list of best SSDs, its inconsistent results and current pricing leave much to be desired, meaning it will have to compete on the value front to make its mark.

The Netac brand is perhaps known better outside of the U.S., but it is expanding with many products on Amazon and may become a future player here. The NV7000 is one of its flagship drives that will be expanded in the future with the NV7000-t, a DRAM-less drive that can hit 7.3 GB/s in sequential workloads, reminiscent of the Acer Predator GM7.

We’re specifically looking at the 4TB model today, which would be a good fit for the PS5 if you want the maximum amount of internal storage. In fact, that’s where we feel this drive works best, but it has to be priced right to make sense. We caution that lower capacity models of this drive, particularly those found in other regions, could come with different hardware. This drive most commonly uses the InnoGrit IG5236 controller with either Micron’s TLC as on the HP FX900 Pro, SK hynix’s TLC as found on the SK hynix Gold P31, or YMTC flash, as we saw on the Predator GM7. The 4TB drive we have today instead uses the ubiquitous Phison E18 with Micron’s decent TLC.

This hardware combination is relatively safe, but the NV7000 demonstrated some performance inconsistencies. That means it’s probably not the ideal drive to buy if you regularly execute heavier workloads. Let's take a closer look. 

Specifications

The Netac NV7000 is available in the 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB flavors. It’s spec'd up to 7,200 / 6,850 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and 940,000 / 1,000,000 random read/write IOPS. Current pricing is $94.99, $109.97, and $333.99 on Amazon with coupons applied. This is on the high side even when accounting for the included heatsink, but the drive would work well in a desktop PC or the PS5. The drive is warrantied for five years and 640TB, 1280TB, and 3000TB of endurance (TBW) for the respective capacities.

Software and Accessories

Netac offers a download for an SSD toolbox on its website. This application is rough around the edges, but it works. It shows the general health of your SSDs, including SMART information, has a place for “migration,” which should clone a drive, allows for firmware updating, and also has the secure erase function. It also has a toggle for TRIM support. The utility is pretty basic, so we recommend using different software, if possible. 

A Closer Look

The NV7000 comes with an aluminum heatsink that’s attached to both sides of the drive with thermal padding. It’s easy enough to remove, if necessary. The drive itself has an SSD controller on the top side, one DRAM package per side for a total of two, and four NAND packages per side for a total of four. A PMIC is located next to the controller.

The Phison E18 SSD controller has proven to be a winner, although, at some point, it may be superseded by less expensive and more efficient designs. It’s backed by two 8Gb DDR4 chips for metadata, which is 2GB in total. This does not meet the best ratio of DRAM to NAND but is more than enough for this type of drive. The SSD also has eight 4Tb NAND packages, each with eight 64GB dies of Micron’s 176-Layer TLC (B47R). This is a lot of dies to address; something ameliorated with Micron’s denser 232-Layer TLC.

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Comparison Products

Although the NV7000 has fairly common hardware, we want to test it against a range of drives to see if it has any nuances. This list of SSDs includes the Rocket 4 Plus-G, the Rocket 4 Plus, the Rocket, the Rocket Q, and the Rocket Q4, all from Sabrent. We also have the Seagate FireCuda 530, the Team A440 Pro, the Team Z44Q, and the WD Red SN700.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The NV7000 performs well enough in 3DMark, although not quite as well as its peers that share the same hardware. The Sabrent 4 Plus-G leads the overall score category with a 12% higher score. 

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The story is the same with PCMark 10. This drive is clearly a leap over the previous generation of drives and has more bandwidth than less expensive PCIe 4.0 options, but it isn’t compelling against its direct competitors.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The NV7000 does shine during file copy workloads, however, going toe-to-toe with the exceptional Rocket 4 Plus-G. The 4 Plus-G is a refined version of the original 4 Plus, using Phison’s I/O+ firmware. This firmware is designed for DirectStorage, which includes sustained workloads.

The Seagate FireCuda 530 also recently received this same firmware update, but it is not applied to our test result in the list. The firmware has not been prominent on other E18 drives, however, it is present on all Phison E26 drives like the Crucial T700, the Gigabyte Aorus 10000, the Seagate FireCuda 540, and the Corsair MP700.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that storage vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

Sequential performance is quite good on the NV7000 in both ATTO and CDM. Random 4KB performance, on the whole, is not bad, but there is a noticeable dip for low queue depth random read latency.

Sustained Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. 

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The NV7000 writes at high speed in its pSLC mode before dropping down to a slower TLC mode, and then eventually struggles to an extremely slow state that brings down its steady state write performance. Its cache is relatively conservative, similar to the other E18 drives on the chart, so its overall performance is lower than expected. The precise speed is less important than the pattern of inconsistency that we see. In normal use, this won’t be a problem, but it does suggest Netac is doing something different, especially when considering the uneven results from other benchmarks.

We have seen some performance inconsistencies like this before on drives that use lower-quality but still consumer-grade flash. After all, you’re not going to hit these endurance numbers with bad NAND. However, there can be performance issues when stress testing, particularly if you’re trying to ensure sufficient write endurance for warranty. This could lead to higher read latency, too. This is pure speculation, but it will not impact performance too deeply, particularly on the PS5. However, it does mean this drive needs to be a less expensive alternative to a drive like the FireCuda 530, for instance.

We will add that this type of performance result is not restricted to lesser-known brands like Netac, as we also had lower write performance with the 2TB Team A440 Pro. Micron confirmed that the flash used on that drive, which we detected as having lower rated endurance, is completely legitimate and could find its way onto any number of drives. That could ostensibly include drives destined for lower-intensity work, like PS5 drives. Our advice is that if an E18 drive seems too inexpensive to be true, it’s probably one that is best fit for console use.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a 24C ambient.

The NV7000’s power efficiency is merely average. We’re used to seeing far more efficient drives these days, but this is not a drive you should buy for a laptop anyway.

Temperature-wise, the NV7000 idled at 33C and hit a maximum of 75C during testing. This is below the throttling temperature and is quite good, considering the workload. This drive appears designed for the PS5 and would be fine with the included heatsink, but it would also work in a high-end desktop PC.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

The Netac NV7000 is a run-of-the-mill high-end PCIe 4.0 SSD, excelling in no one area and coming with some performance inconsistencies. We don’t necessarily think this is down to Netac, and it may be a wider problem due to how the flash and SSD markets are currently spiraling. It’s become commonplace for even reputable manufacturers to change the underlying SSD hardware whenever it’s convenient, whether that's the controller, flash, or both. This is extremely typical outside of Western markets but is essentially worldwide at this point, with perhaps some nervousness for Maxio controllers and YMTC flash in the U.S.

Netac and other lesser-known brands are making a push into other markets, including Amazon. They often use comparable hardware to better-known brands, but to compete, they still ultimately have to offer drives at a lower price point. It’s not uncommon to get very good prices if you can wait through other avenues like AliExpress, too. It’s worth looking at these drives as, quite honestly, the impressive results we saw with the Predator GM7 show that there’s still room for growth with PCIe 4.0 SSDs. That may include the soon-to-be-released NV7000-t, but the base NV7000 is largely disappointing at this stage.

We would recommend this drive for use in the PS5 to get extra storage that will effectively be as fast as it gets. We'll need to see a price reduction for that to make sense, though. It’s also probably not our first choice for desktop PC or workstation use, given the plethora of better options. We also know the lower-capacity NV700s have shown up with different hardware, and, although largely okay, some caution is necessary — particularly as the alternative IG5236 controller has known issues with YMTC TLC flash. 

If you’re looking for an alternative but sticking with this class of drive, you’re better off with the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, Seagate FireCuda 530, or similar drives that have very high sustained sequential write performance.

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Some of the best SSDs, specifically the PCIe 5.0 drives based on the Phison PS5026-E26 controller, have been crashing instead of thermal throttling when operating without a cooler. However, it is worth noting that all of the impacted drives are designed and marketed to specifically be used with a heatsink, so the conditions that expose the thermal shutdown will not present themselves if the drives are used correctly (in accordance with manufacturer specifications).

Initially, only the Corsair MP700 exhibited this behavior; however, it's now become apparent that the issue is more widespread and affects other Phison E26-based SSDs that are designed for heatsinks when they are used without heatsinks attached.

German news outlet Computerbase discovered that the Seagate FireCuda 540, Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 10000, and Adata Legend 970 also suffer from the shutdown issue. It was to be expected since the PCIe 5.0 SSDs utilize the same Phison E26 controller. The FireCuda 540, Aorus Gen5 10000, and Leged 970 are still on firmware 22. Seagate hasn't gotten back to Computerbase when the new firmware will be available, whereas Gigabyte promised that it'll arrive "soon."

To recap: the issue only occurs when you use a PCIe 5.0 SSD without cooling. When the drive gets too hot, it shuts down to protect the SSD controller, NAND, and data. This shouldn't be an issue if the PCIe 5.0 drive is adequately cooled by the included heatsink or the M.2 heatsink from the motherboard. Regardless, Phison has released a new firmware (version 22.1) that ensures the PCIe 5.0 SSDs throttle — instead of just crashing, which can lead to data loss. 

Firmware 22.1 introduces link-state thermal throttling that essentially reduces the PCIe interface speed — for example, dropping from PCIe 5.0 to PCIe 4.0 or even PCIe 3.0 to lower the temperature of the physical layer (PHY) without throttling the processor clock. This will obviously impact the PCIe 5.0 SSD's performance, but it should also keep it from engaging a shutdown to protect the integrity of the SSD controller. According to Computerbase, the thermal threshold on the new firmware 22.1 is 85 degrees Celsius.

In the beginning, the Crucial T700 didn't have the issue. The PCIe 5.0 would throttle until the drive operated at hard drive speeds but didn't shut down thermally. Computerbase performed more tests on the Crucial T700, and it showed similar failures, so the drive may also need the firmware 22.1 update.

Under the new firmware 22.1, Phison E26-powered SSDs should still provide an acceptable level of performance at high temperatures. Without a cooler, the Corsair MP700 delivered sequential read and write speeds over 10 GB/s and 2 GB/s, respectively. Remember that it's a safety measure in case temperatures get out of hand, and you should always use a cooler with your PCIe 5.0 SSD.

Edit: 7/21/2023 3:45pm PT: Clarified that these SSDs are specifically designed to be used with a heatsink. 

When Sabrent earlier this year announced plans to build a PCIe Gen5 SSD with a read speed of 14 GB/s, we were impressed. Today Sabrent sent out a screenshot with proof that its upcoming Rocket X5 can achieve such a level of performance and even said that it is working to achieve even higher speeds to topple the best SSDs currently available.

Sabrent's Rocket X5 can hit sequential read speeds of 14,179 MB/s and sequential write speeds of 12,280 MB/s in CrystalDiskMark. As for random performance, Sabrent's prototype drive can hit 1.56 million 4K read IOPS and 1.669 4K write IOPS, comparable to high-end enterprise-grade SSDs.

Speaking of enterprise-grade SSDs, we are talking about Samsung's PM1743 PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD, which achieved approximately 13.8 GB/s throughput with Intel's Alder Lake processor in the IOMeter benchmark in late 2021. Apparently, Sabrent can reach even higher speeds with its Phison PS5026-E26-based drive, albeit by using very fast 3D TLC NAND with at least 2400 MT/s interface. 

"The new Rocket X5 is still in the tunning process, and we expect performance to improve even better," a statement by Sabrent reads. "This still needs to be a finished product, but we are moving forward with the tech we have at hand now. To name a few items, many things can change, including the name and label and the heat sink. As we work with Phison very closely, new tech is on the way, and Phison assists us in pushing what we have now to achieve groundbreaking results."

Sabrent said it had conducted experiments with various thermal solutions aimed at keeping these extreme drives cool. The company indicated that the current thermal solution is specifically tailored to cool these next-gen SSDs efficiently, and its fan does not produce any high-frequency noise.

"Stay tuned to Sabrent for news on our other top-performing products as we approach the release," the company said. "Our test lab is very busy these days with many new groundbreaking products we will release soon."

Seagate is getting into PCIe Gen5 SSD race with its FireCuda 540 drives that promise to offer performance that is on par with some of the best SSDs out there and which by far surpasses that of PCIe Gen4 drives. In addition to up 1.5M IOPS and up to 10 GB/s sequential read and write speeds, the FireCuda 540 devices also promise to offer endurance and reliability that we come to expect from Seagate.

Seagate's FireCuda 540 2TB SSD is rated for an up to 10,000 MB/s sequential read/write speeds as well as up to 1.5 million random IOPS, according to early listings at Amazon UK and B&H in the U.S. (discovered by @momomo_us). The drive is rated for an up to 2,000 terabytes to be written (TBW) over its warranty period of five years, which is a bit higher than 1,400 TBW endurance featured by competing PCIe Gen5 SSDs. In addition to higher endurance rating, the drive comes bundled with a three-year subscription to Seagate's Rescue data recovery service. 

Seagate hasn't disclosed which controller it uses for its FireCuda 540 2TB SSD, but given the fact that the company collaborates very closely with Phison and the fact that the only client SSD platform that is ready for prime time is Phison's PS5026-E26, it is safe to say that this is the controller that powers the drive. Meanwhile, Seagate decided not to equip its new SSDs sophisticated cooling system, unlike its rivals, so the drive comes with a graphene heat spreader. 

As for 3D NAND memory, Seagate's FireCuda 540 seems to use time-proven 3D TLC NAND with a 1,600 MT/s interface, which is why it is confined to 10,000 MB/s sequential read/write speeds. Meanwhile, with up to 1,500,000 random read/write IOPS, it should provide the same overall user experience as the drives rated for 12,500 MB/s sequential read/write speeds in most of the cases.

Seagate's 2TB FireCuda 540 drive is set to cost $319.99 in the USA, which is in line with other 2TB PCIe Gen5 SSDs offering similar performance that are on the market.

Seagate is known primarily for its notable best hard drives, but it also produces some of the finest SSDs out there. Both FireCuda 520 and FireCuda 530 won praises from Tom's Hardware. There was an issue with these drives though: they came to market with a rather significant delay compared to rivals as Seagate wanted to max out everything it could get from respective Phison controllers. By contrast, the FireCuda 540 is about to be release about three months after the first PCIe Gen5 drives hit the market, which is definitely an improvement when it comes to timing.

Based on specifications that we know about the FireCuda 540 2TB, we can said that the company has managed to max out random read/write performance out of a Phison PS5026-E26-based drive even without using the fastest memory available and keeps offering a higher endurance rating when compared to at least some of the competing drives. It will be particularly interesting to see these drives in our lab.

Galax today announced its new HOF Extreme 50S PCIe 5.0 SSDs on Chinese social media site Weibo. What difference does the 'S' make? According to Galax's in-house testing, the new models deliver read and write speeds up to 12.4 GB/s and 11.8 GB/s, respectively. Reports also suggest that these drives are capable of 1,500K IOPS.

You might be thinking that you've already heard of these Galax Hall of Fame SSDs, as we covered the HOF Extreme 50 drives inMarch. But now the component-maker has added an 'S' suffix to the product name, which represents an upgrade to the line. And the increase in transfer speeds delivered by the HOF Extreme 50S is a pretty significant upgrade at nearly 25%.

The new Galax HOF Extreme 50S PCIe 5.0 SSDs look just like their predecessors and feature the same Phison controller, so it's natural to wonder how the 'S' models achieved such an impressive performance boost. The upgraded models appear to feature a new ECC algorithm technology and fifth-generation LDPC error correction capability. We don't see any other differences in the specs that have been shared so far; the controller, NAND, and cache all seem to be the same, but perhaps some other difference will become apparent once the SSD product pages are updated.

As long as we're talking about similarities, the upgraded SSD is definitely aesthetically identical to its predecessor — right down to the contoured, white metal, actively-cooled heatsink with HOF design flourishes.

The Galax HOF Extreme 50 was launched in a slower 1TB capacity, as well as a 2TB capacity (the 2TB model's performance is shown in the above table). Chinese tech media reports that the new HOF Extreme 50S will be initially made available in a 2TB capacity, and will eventually be followed by a 4TB model.

Galax did not reveal pricing and availability for the new PCIe 5.0 SSD. In its social media post, the company declared the  HOF Extreme 50S "released," but we have yet to see it show up online. 

The Seagate Lightsaber Collection Special Edition FireCuda is the SSD to get for Star Wars fans. A sleek heatsink and switchable heroic lightsaber faceplates are combined with addressable RGB LEDs for an unmistakable look. It’s a potential showpiece for your build, and you can control the lighting through software to match your specific aesthetic. The drive itself is nothing special, but it’s fast enough for any sort of use and has Seagate’s comforting three-year data recovery service to boot, making it a contender for our list of Best SSDs.

Underneath the Seagate Lightsaber FireCuda, as we will henceforth call it, is essentially Seagate’s older FireCuda 530. This drive is known for good performance in sustained workload and is a high-end PCIe 4.0 SSD with a high endurance (TBW) rating. Seagate’s warranty comes with one attempt at data recovery, and they also support the drive with its SeaTools software. That means this drive is a safe bet, even if it’s not the fastest. The challenge would be in acquiring one!

The Lightsaber FireCuda is meant to be shown off, which means it’s intended for desktop use. It arrives with three changeable faceplates and a long ARGB connector cable. The latter can be a pain to work with, depending on your predilections for cable running. The heatsink is functional and designed by EKWB, which matches well with the higher sustained performance. Otherwise, this is a standard FireCuda 530, which is among the more consistent SSDs based on Phison’s E18 SSD controller.

Specifications

The Seagate Lightsaber FireCuda is available at 1TB and 2TB, priced currently around $159.99 and $239.99, respectively. It can be difficult to find these drives, and the price is fairly high for what you get, but if you want the specific aesthetic, it’s not too bad. The drive is fastest at 2TB, hitting 7,300 MBps / 6,900 MBps for sequential reads and writes and 1M / 1M IOPS for random reads and writes.

Seagate warranties this drive for five years and 1,275TB of writes per TB of capacity, which is pretty high. It is not recommended to use the TBW rating when selecting a drive, as even the standard 600TB per TB is an immense amount of writes. Seagate also backs the SSD with its three-year Rescue Data Recovery Services which is nice, although probably more useful for hard drives.

Software and Accessories

The Lightsaber FireCuda comes with the standard manuals and packaged content, including a notice of its Rescue Data Recovery Services. It’s also possible to download SeaTools on Seagate’s site for Windows, Linux, and in a bootable format, which is nice to see. The SeaTools application offers standard monitoring and tools for Seagate’s HDDs and SSDs.

A Closer Look

The Seagate Lightsaber SSD arrives in a comfortable box with three faceplates to use, including those of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker, and Darth Vader, all officially licensed. Also included is a 40cm, or almost 16”, LED RGB connector cable. This cable lets you control the addressable RGB (ARGB) lightning with a wide array of RGB software applications.

The drive is clad in an effective heatsink crafted by EKWB, the same company that helped with the Seagate FireCuda 530 that forms the basis of this drive, although the design is different.

The LED bar is thick underneath, but otherwise no surprises. This drive still uses the Phison E18 SSD controller, 176-Layer Micron TLC (B47R), and DDR4 memory. This drive is double-sided with two DRAM and eight NAND packages. It has the standard 2GB of DRAM, and at 2TB, there is an excellent amount of flash for interleaving, so that’s where the drive reaches its peak performance.

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Comparison Products

Some things have changed since our Seagate FireCuda 530 review, so the Star Wars variant of the drive faces some new challengers, including the PCIe 5.0 Crucial T700. It’s also up against the original FireCuda 530, the Samsung 990 Pro, the Solidigm P44 Pro, the WD Black SN850X, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, the Crucial P5 Plus, the Adata Legend 960 Max, amd the Corsair MP600 Core XT. All of these drives are high-end PCIe 4.0 except for the last, which is a mid-range, QLC-based part.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The Lightsaber FireCuda performs the same as the original FireCuda 530, as expected. Results are mediocre, including against the DirectStorage-optimized Rocket 4 Plus-G.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The Lightsaber FireCuda shows its age, losing out to fresher PCIe 4.0 SSDs, aside from the Legend 960 Max and MP600 Core XT.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The Lightsaber FireCuda copies fairly fast, within striking distance of the P44 Pro. All drives fall behind the might of the PCIe 5.0 Crucial T700.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark 

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The Lightsaber FireCuda shines brighter in ATTO, which is unsurprising as SSDs powered by Phison controllers perform well in this benchmark. It’s also clear to see that the PCIe 5.0 Crucial T700 pulls away from the pack. Sequential performance in CDM is fairly good on the Lightsaber FireCuda, aside from QD1 sequential reads, where the FireCuda 530 is even worse. The T700 dominates here, too.

Turning to random performance, the Lightsaber FireCuda manages to hang with the crowd but can’t quite reach the 990 Pro and T700 when it comes to 4K random reads at QD1. This is a key metric used to estimate real-world performance and feel, and the 990 Pro’s faster flash is still unbeatable.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. 

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The original FireCuda 530 was one of the most consistent SSDs we’ve tested, thanks to its conservative pSLC cache. The Lightsaber FireCuda is virtually identical. It writes in pSLC mode at up to 6.9 GBps for over 30 seconds with a cache size of around 225GB. The write speed then declines to about 3.8 GBps in TLC mode, fast enough that it eventually reduces to folding at less than half that speed.

This is a good result with the Lightsaber FireCuda getting close to the Rocket 4 Plus-G at steady state, the latter drive among the fastest we’ve tested aside from the Legend 960 Max and T700. This makes the drive a good option for certain heavier workloads. pSLC recovery time to TLC performance levels is also good, but recovery to maximum speed takes longer. Avoiding additional writes and letting sequential writes hit TLC can be beneficial for reducing unnecessary wear, which can help support the high TBW rating.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

The Lightsaber FireCuda is surprisingly efficient, although far from the best. Using the LEDs should not be a concern, and this drive is adequately cooled. It’s precluded from being used in a laptop due to the heatsink, and the same is true of the PlayStation 5, although you wouldn’t be able to see the lightsaber in those cases, anyway.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Bottom Line

The Seagate FireCuda Lightsaber SSD is merely an average performer within the high-end PCIe 4.0 array of SSDs, yet it easily stands out by its appearance. It arrives in thoughtful and tasteful packaging with an unambiguous Star Wars aesthetic, and who doesn’t love lightsabers? However, that’s mostly what this is - an SSD for Star Wars fans to show off in their desktop builds. The pricing reflects that and it’s essentially a collector’s item, which is perfectly fine. You can go with a cheaper drive and even design your own solution if you can’t find one of these.

Of perhaps greater contention is the focus on RGB LEDs. Historically, LEDs have had a rough road with SSDs. The Kingston HyperX Fury RGB SSD was prone to overheating due to using so many LEDs. Other drives, like the Patriot Viper VPR100, saw potential performance drops depending on the RGB mode. We had no issues with the Adata XPG Spectrix S40G, which like the Lightsaber FireCuda, has addressable RGB. However, RGB, in general, is a meme for flashy builds, and it’s not uncommon to have issues getting RGB software to behave.

It’s not really fair to compare this drive to other standard SSDs, as it’s designed for a specific purpose unrelated to its performance. However, it is generally fast enough to be “fast,” and the heatsink plus high sustained performance make it good for a wide range of applications. It’s possible to get an equivalent-performing SSDs and embellish it yourself, if you desire to get the right aesthetic. The Lightsaber FireCuda’s design won’t match all builds, even with the RGB LEDs. On the other hand, the inclusion of three faceplates means that you don’t have to settle for one specific Star Wars hero’s lightsaber.

On the whole, this is a cool drive, even if it comes from Seagate, a storage company that hasn’t really gotten deep into the SSD game. It would be interesting to see how well its data recovery service works with SSDs. It is nice to know that your expensive lightsaber SSD is backed by something a little extra. Aside from that, the biggest downside is dealing with the cable. If that’s not an issue for you and you can find this drive, it could be a worthwhile grab.

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TeamGroup has revealed many exciting products at this year's Computex event. However, the T-Force Siren GD120S may be one of the most overkill M.2 SSD coolers we’ve seen, and we’ve seen a lot of beefy coolers since PCIe 5.0 SSDs have started to  arrive on the retail market. When you thought SSD coolers couldn't get any crazier, TeamGroup comes out with an 120mm AIO liquid cooler designed for cooling the PCIe 5.0 drives, which are habitually among the best SSDs.

The T-Force Siren GD120S, which comes in a pure white color, is a good-looking AIO liquid cooler for M.2 2280 drives. The cooler features a copper base plate that transfers the heat from the SSD via two tubes toward the aluminum radiator, which measures 266 x 215 x 136mm. The pump is pretty good, with rated speeds of up to 4,000 RPM, give or take, delivering a flow performance of up to 850 ml/min. Therefore, it should be able to move a decent amount of heat at a respectable rate.

The cooler consumes up to 4W; according to TeamGroup, the pump's noise level is around 22 dBA. There are louder components inside your case. Meanwhile, a single 120mm ARGB cooling fan is responsible for dissipating the heat from the radiator. The cooling fan spins between 600 and 2,200 RPM with a maximum noise level of 39.5 dBA, just a bit louder than a whisper.

TeamGroup hasn’t decided on the pricing for the T-Force Siren GD120S yet. However, the company is aiming for a third quarter launch. It’s not like there are tons of M.2 AIO liquid coolers on the market so we can’t even guess the pricing for the T-Force Siren GD120S.

TeamGroup also lifted the curtain for the brand's T-Force AirFlow series of PCIe 5.0 coolers that feature a more conventional style of air cooling. The company split the coolers into three models: T-Force AirFlow I, T-Force AirFlow II, and T-Force AirFlow III. The designs differ slightly, so consumers must decide which works best per their system configuration and clearance space. Graphics cards aren’t getting any smaller so it’s a challenge to fit aftermarket M.2 SSD coolers in a build.

The T-Force AirFlow series feature thick heat pipes, aluminum heatsinks with optimized fin stacks, and in some cases, a small cooling fan, similar to Phison's reference PCIe 5.0 cooler. TeamGroup claims that the T-Force AirFlow series can lower SSD temperatures by up to 30%.

TeamGroup also displayed the brand's Cardea Z5 series of SSDs at its booth. However, these aren't the same drives as the Cardea Z54A the brand had previously teased. Strangely, the brand didn't take the opportunity to reveal more information about the faster drive since the company was making a big deal about the SSD days before Computex 2023.

The Cardea Z5, which comes in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, is a couple of notches below the Z54A. The drives max out with sequential read and write speeds up to 12 GB/s and 11 GB/s, respectively. In comparison, the Cardea Z54A breaks the 14 GB/s and 11 GB/s barriers regarding sequential read and write performance. The manufacturer rates the Cardea Z5 with endurance levels up to 1,400 TBW. The PCIe 5.0 SSDs come with a standard five-year warranty.

TeamGroup's other displayed products include the latest T-Force XTREEM gaming and overclocking memory, which will arrive on the market in traditional and ARGB flavors. In addition, consumers can choose from different speeds up to 8,266 MT/s.

The T-Force Siren GA360 AIO liquid cooler also made an appearance. The cooler rocks a seventh-generation Asetek V2 pump and leverages AI for operation. Some of the smaller products include two USB 3.2 thumb drives. The C321 is Gen 2 with read and write speed peaking at 1 GB/s and capacities up to 2TB. Meanwhile, the C175 is a Gen 1 drive manufactured from 75% post-consumer recycled plastic.

Computex has kicked off, which means that the Tom's Hardware crew is on the ground covering all the highlights for the event. Our mission is to cover all the latest news of interest to our readers, and we've got a slew of stories for you from Computex 2023.

Here are the highlights from our Day One coverage from Computex 2023.

AI is on the Brain

Artificial intelligence is a hot topic of discussion and that isn't lost on some of the big names in the tech industry. Both Intel and Nvidia have announced new AI initiatives, but they go about it in different ways.

• Intel Demos Meteor Lake's AI Acceleration for PCs, Details VPU Unit
• Nvidia ACE Brings AI to Game Characters, Allows Lifelike Conversations

Laptops Continue to Impress With Innovative Features and Elevated Performance

We always expect OEMs to announce their latest and greatest laptops at Computex; this year's show is no exception. For example, Acer uses AMD's new Ryzen 7840U CPU and Radeon 780M graphics with its Swift Edge 16. The laptop will also be among the first to support Wi-Fi 7. MSI is also getting in on the action with new gaming laptops sporting a partnership with Mercedes-AMD Motorsports.

• Acer’s Swift Edge 16 Uses Ryzen 7040, Supports Wi-Fi 7
• MSI Gets Fast & Furious With Mercedes-AMG Gaming Laptop

PCIe 5.0 SSDs Are Ready for the Spotlight
Manufacturers have been talking up PCIe 5.0 SSD for years, and we're just now seeing the first examples hit the market, offering remarkable performance. We see entries from various manufacturers using the Phison PS5026-E26 or Innogrit IG5666 controllers.

• MSI Spatium M570 Pro PCIe 5.0 SSD Tops 14.2 GB/s, up to 23 GB/s in RAID
• TeamGroup Announce 'Dazzling' Range at Computex

Cases, Cooling and PSU... Oh My!

With all the high-powered Intel Raptor Lake and AMD Ryzen 7000 processors making the rounds along with Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 and Radeon 7000 sucking power at a furious rate, keeping this hardware fed and cooled is paramount. Luckily, we've seen some new cases, cooler, and power supplies that are bound to capture the attention of the enthusiast community.

• Asus' ROG Matrix RTX 4090 Is Ultra-Premium, Liquid-Cooled, and Likely Ultra-Expensive
• Lian Li Debuts Cases With Glass on Many Sides, Case Fan with Screen
• TeamGroup Goes All in on Active SSD Cooling With a Trio of Towers
• Cooler Master's Tiny NCore 100 Max Case Finds Room for RTX 4090
• Hyte THICC Q60 AiO Water Block Includes 5-Inch IPS Display
• Cooler Master's V SFX PSUs Hit 1300W, X Silent Fanless Options Up to 750 Watts
• Cooler Master Unveils Full Line of Street Fighter Components, Peripherals
• Cooler Master Unveils New AIO Coolers, Open Loop Concept
• Enermax Cable Master 20 Case Designed for Rear and Front-Mounted Cabling

The Best of the Rest

• Cooler Master's Modular Stream Deck Competitor Snaps Together Like Lego
• Cougar's NxSys Aero Chair Cools Your Back With a 200mm ARGB Fan
• SK Hynix Preps HBM3E Memory: A 25% Speed Boost Over HBM3
• Aorus Z790 Xtreme X Motherboard Lives Up to Name With Wi-Fi 7, Screen and 4x SSDs
• Asus Demos RTX 4070 GPU With No Power Connectors on BTF Motherboard
• Asus' New Wireless Gaming Keyboard Has Custom Switches, Dampening Foam

Keep Up With Tom’s Hardware at Computex 2023

We’re going to be in Taiwan all week bringing you all the best from Computex 2023. You can keep up with our coverage from the show floor by checking out the Computex page on our site as well as following us on Facebook and Twitter. We also want to know what you expect to see from Computex 2023, so join the discussion over in the Tom’s Hardware community forums!

The Crucial T700 sets a new bar in performance for consumer SSDs, pushing speed higher than any other PCIe 5.0 NVMe drive on the market. It reigns as the king of the hill for sequential bandwidth and random IOPS, at least for now. Its native DirectStorage firmware optimization is an added benefit over almost all PCIe 4.0 SSDs for future gaming, as well. Crucial departs from the reference heatsink design with its own effective solution while also offering a cheaper, bare-drive variant for easier installation with motherboard and custom M.2 heatsinks. Together, this makes it a nice option for enthusiasts and early adopters.

The T700 is part of a wave of PCIe 5.0 SSDs about to deluge the consumer SSD market, all so far based on the same Phison E26 controller and Micron flash. This puts pressure on the manufacturers to differentiate their products in other ways, particularly with cooling. This could bring some innovation to the market, but current industry trends have created lingering concerns about the future of NAND that could eventually reduce the buyer’s pricing advantage from such competition.

Competing controllers are also on the way with InnoGrit’s IG5666 and SMI’s SM2508, and flash of the 232-Layer generation should be in wider production from Micron and other manufacturers. Faster drives based on the Phison E26 SSD Controller have also been announced offering up to 14 GBps, so early drives like the T700 have a limited window to shine. We’ll know more after Computex, which is currently underway, but many of these drives won’t be available until later in the year. At the time of review, this drive is the fastest of its crop.

Specifications

The Crucial T700 is available at 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities in both bare and heatsinked variants with MSRPs of $179.99/$209.99, $339.99/$369.99, and $599.99/$629.99, respectively. This is a significant premium over slower PCIe 5.0 SSDs like the heatsinked Inland TD510, where the 2TB model can be had for $249.99 at the time of review. It’s likely that the T700’s price will come down some time after launch, but these prices are what Crucial currently lists on its store.

Let's also be clear that paying $30 extra for the small metal heatsink is asking far too much. If you have a motherboard with a decent M.2 heatsink, you should just get that model. The included heatsink does work fine in our testing, but a $10 premium would be more in line with what you're getting.

The T700 is capable of reaching 12,400 MBps / 11,800 MBps for sequential reads and writes and 1,500 million IOPS for both random reads and writes. The primary benefit over slower PCIe 5.0 SSD variants is the sequential performance increase, but write IOPS are also higher. Crucial warranties this drive for the typical 600TB written per TB of capacity at up to five years. The retail drive has TCG Opal 2.01 support for encryption, which was not enabled in our previous Crucial T700 Preview.

Software and Accessories

Crucial offers its own SSD toolbox called the Crucial Storage Executive, which has the typical features you would expect. This includes drive information, SMART attributes, firmware updates, secure erase/sanitize, overprovisioning, and other features related to encryption. Third-party software like CloneZilla is recommended for cloning and imaging.

A Closer Look

The Crucial T700 can be purchased with or without its custom, passive heatsink. The heatsink is carefully designed to avoid the need for a fan, using a variety of materials and an airflow-optimized shape. The backplate makes it usable in motherboards that have flush thermal padding, which can be removed for this drive.

The non-heatsinked variant of the drive comes with a label that should not be removed, and the drive should not be operated without sufficient cooling applied. Such cooling would include a motherboard’s M.2 heatsink or your own aftermarket solution. The drive should not be used bare in the PlayStation 5 or in a laptop.

The drive itself has an SSD controller, one DRAM package, and two NAND packages on the top side. The rear side has two more NAND packages for a total of four. There's also a power management integrated circuit, or PMIC, labeled Phison.

The T700 utilizes Phison’s E26 SSD controller, an 8-channel design capable of running a bus speed of up to 2400 MT/s to help saturate four lanes of PCIe 5.0 connectivity. Initial E26 drives top out around 10 GBps at 1600 MT/s, but Crucial has opted for 2000 MT/s here. Future drives, some of which have been already announced, will push 2400 MT/s for 14 GBps or more. Higher speeds put more stress on the hardware, so cooling becomes more critical, especially with sustained workloads.

The 2TB T700 comes with 32Gb, or 4GB, of LPDDR4. This is more than enough memory even for the 4TB SKU. LPDDR4 is more power-efficient than DDR4 but the impact is not enough to help keep the E26 solution from being very power-hungry.

The flash is Micron’s 232-Layer TLC, or B58R, capable of running at 1600-2400 MT/s. This hexa-plane flash comes in 1Tb dies, so each 512GB package has four dies for a total of sixteen. Given the E26’s 8-channel design, it’s therefore possible that peak performance will be realized at the 4TB capacity.

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Comparison Products

The 2TB Crucial T700 SSD is tested both with Crucial’s heatsink (labeled "HS" in the charts) and with out Asus motherboard’s heatsink (labeled "(Mobo)" in the charts). It’s up against other current PCIe 5.0 SSDs including the Corsair MP700, the Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 10000, the Inland TD510, and we also have results from the engineering sample (ES) Phison E26. The high-end PCIe 4.0 drives in our charts include the Adata Legend 960 Max, Crucial P5 Plus, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, Samsung 990 Pro, and Solidigm P44 Pro.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The T700 is the fastest drive we’ve tested to date in 3DMark. The performance improvement over other PCIe 5.0 SSDs is a modest 4~7 percent, with a larger gap between the T700 and leading 4.0 options.

Speaking of gaming, drives using the E26 SSD controller come with Phison’s I/O+ firmware for DirectStorage optimization, which is only available on one PCIe 4.0 SSD, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G. Faster drives should be out by the time that makes a real impact, however.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

PCMark 10 shows a similar pattern with the T700 again on top. The real-world differences between the top drives are very small, especially among the PCIe 5.0 models, but the slightly higher transfer speeds do push Crucial to the top.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

Copy speeds in DiskBench are faster, with significant gains over previously-tested drives. The main reason to buy PCIe 5.0 drives right now is for this type of performance if you are capable of making use of it — meaning, you have a Z690/Z790 or X670 class motherboard.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The T700 rules the day in ATTO, particularly as the block size increases past 64KB. There’s a dip at 2MB which, as mentioned in our Crucial T700 Preview, could be a controller quirk or a facet of the flash organization. It's present on the other Phison E26 drives as well for read performance. The T700 also dominates in the CDM sequential results, as expected.

One area the T700 falls short is with random 4KB performance at queue depth 1, still an important result for everyday workloads. In particular, random read latency is critical, and here the T700 comes in second to the Samsung 990 Pro. This is due to Samsung’s 176-Layer TLC having superior read latency. The T700 does do slightly better than previous PCIe 5.0 SSDs, possibly as a small boost from the higher MT/s rate.

Micron’s 232-Layer flash was designed more with density in mind and this may be the case with competing flash to come, which dents the appeal of current 5.0 drives if you’re seeking performance over capacity.

One additional note is that our drives under test are not operating as the primary, or OS, drive. The preview T700 sample had reduced random write performance when used as the primary drive, but this has been fixed for release.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The 2TB T700 writes at up to 12 GBps for over 20 seconds. This matches what Crucial states, which is that about 11% of user capacity is allocated for the dynamic cache. When the drive is empty this is over 220GB from 660GB of SLC, or approximately one-third of the drive’s raw NAND capacity. This is a decently-sized cache to help balance burst and sustained performance even as the drive fills.

The precise pattern of writing will depend on your cooling and the drive’s placement, as demonstrated by the difference between our T700 as native and with a motherboard heatsink. We're testing drives in a PCIe expansion card with the Asus motherboard, and this includes a very large metal cover that serves as a heatsink — far larger than a typical M.2 cooler.

After the cache is exhausted, the T700 writes at around 3.6 GBps in TLC mode. It can maintain this for quite a while before hitting a folding state at around half this speed, and when the cache recovers the drive goes back to TLC. Recovery to TLC performance should be relatively rapid and is adequately fast. This flash should be able to sustain higher levels of TLC performance at 4TB with additional interleaving, but this remains to be seen.

Thermals and Temperatures

We've also begun to collect data on drive temperatures during our DiskBench and Iometer write saturation testing. The latter, as you can imagine, is far more demanding and represents a worst-case scenario. Using the version of the T700 that includes a heatsink during the write saturation testing, it reached a peak temperature of 87C on the controller. At that point, it begins throttling, which is why you see periodic dips in the above write saturation tests around the 850 second mark.

What ends up happening is a short period (less than a second) of reduced performance, then the drive returns to full (saturated) speeds for around 10 seconds. Rinse and repeat until the workload is done.

Please note that this is not a real-world scenario that would normally be encountered by a consumer drive. During our 15 minute stress test, Iometer wrote 2.95 TB of data to the T700. In other words, it more than filled the drive. During the DiskBench testing, where we copy 100GB of files to the drive three times in short succession, drive temperatures peaked at 51C.

Certainly, a larger/heatsink and/or direct active cooling can dramatically drop temperatures. With the large Asus heatsink on the expansion card, peak temperatures during our Iometer testing only reached 54C. This time, due to the lower temperatures and lack of throttling, the T700 drive managed to write just over 3TB of data in nine and a half minutes. The DiskBench tests in this case didn't even break 40C.

Power Consumption 

We use a Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs, including all of the PCIe 5.0 SSDs we've tested, can consume a few watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects we'll look at, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

The T700, like the other drives based on the Phison E26 SSD controller, pulls a lot of power. It’s not nearly as efficient as even the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives. This is something that will be ameliorated in time with more efficient controllers and flash. Considering that these 5.0 drives are designed for high-end desktop use only, the issue of power draw is less concerning than it would normally be.

The T700 preview sample had not been optimized for the lowest power states, PS3 and PS4, that is the idle states. This is not a huge factor as the drive should not be making its way into laptops and is hardly a drive you’d choose for a low-power build. Still, the drive at release can use these power states at a typical 85 milliwatts.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Bottom Line

The Crucial T700 is the fastest SSD we’ve tested to date. Some minor wrinkles have been ironed out since our preview, and the drive as a whole produced good results. Drives that are just as fast or even faster have been announced, but this one is available here and now. Crucial has gone to great lengths to offer a decent, passive heatsink, while leaving the option open for you to use your own M.2 cooling solution. This makes it attractive in comparison to existing, slower PCIe 5.0 SSDs that use the reference cooler design with a fan, like the Inland TD510.

The Gigabyte Aorus 10000 also has a heatsink option, albeit with less clearance, but that drive is also slower. If you’re shooting for a drive that comes with a heatsink, however, it is currently $30 less at 2TB than Crucial’s price. If you're looking for a sans-heatsink alternative, the 2TB Corsair MP700 is $40 less than the bare T700, although it may be difficult to find in stock. There should be more options after Computex, especially as we get into August with both pricing and availability expected to improve.

The current outlook divides the PCIe 5.0 SSDs into three rough categories: 10 GBps, ~12 GBps, and ~14 GBps (in the future), all for maximum sequential reads but with boosts to sequential writes possible as well. Directly competing in the middle level with the T700 will be the Team Cardea Z540 and the KLEVV CRAS C950, among others. Faster known drives include the MSI Spatium M570 Pro and ADATA’s Project NeonStorm, as well as the IG5666-based Team Group Z54A. More will certainly be revealed during Computex. Pricing and cooling will differ between these options, but ultimately the lower tiers are early adopter products by design.

As for the PCIe 5.0 selling point a drive like this may have, the performance results speak for themselves: For anything but sequential bandwidth, you should go for a much cheaper PCIe 4.0 SSD. Even on a PCIe 5.0 capable board, getting a drive that performs similarly aside from sequential speeds while being much more efficient makes sense — and many 4.0 drives don't require a heatsink. Furthermore, these early 5.0 drives are as slow as 10 GBps with the T700’s 12 GBps currently the fastest available, neither of which make full use of 5.0 bandwidth.

These SSDs need more time to mature. They can be fun for early adopters and enthusiasts that want to set some records. There's still the possibility of higher capacities, not yet realized, which is also nice. If you are already feeding into that mindset with your build then the premium isn’t that crazy, but if you are not hell-bent on cutting-edge storage you should stick with drives like the Solidigm P44 Pro or WD Black SN850X.

This could influence overall system building decisions, and DirectStorage does not currently have sufficient presence to be a factor if you’ll be upgrading again in a year or two, or even three.

That said, the Crucial T700 is nice for what it is, and it’s important that manufacturers keep pushing the limits. Better products at better prices are a net benefit and encourage market penetration of newer storage hardware, which will hopefully hasten the arrival of DirectStorage-enabled games and applications. The T700 is very fast and we applaud it for that today, but we can’t wait to see better things in the future. 

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It looks as though MSI is nearly ready to push its Spatium M570 Pro PCIe 5.0 SSD out the door. The company showed off its latest SSDs at its Computex booth in Taipei this week, and we were able to get up close and personal with two versions of the SSD. We first saw the SSD earlier this year at MSI’s CES booth, where it hit sequential read and write speeds of 12,000 MBps and 10,000 MBps, respectively. In the months since that early look, MSI was able to ratchet up performance to place it among the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs for 2023.

MSI showed off the Spatium Pro M570 Pro in Frozr and Frozer+ versions. The former has a massive, passively cooled heatsink with beefy pipes to dissipate heat. The company says that this arrangement reduces temperatures by up to 20 degrees Celsius. The Frozr+ ups the stakes with a Torx 5.0 fan and ARGB lighting. The fan helps reduce temperatures by a further 10 degrees Celsius. Performance is identical between the Frozr and the Frozr+, but the latter runs cooler under load.

MSI’s latest performance benchmarks from CrystalDiskMark show the Spatium M570 Pro surpassing 14,200 MBps in sequential reads, while sequential writes come in at well over 12,000 MBps. That puts the read performance slightly behind the T-Force Z54A but ahead in write performance. However, we must caution that there’s more to SSD performance than the raw sequential read/write speeds, but MSI is still looking very strong with this new entry into the PCIe 5.0 SSD field.

But that isn't all. MSI also showed off the Spatium Pro M570 Pro Frozr running in RAID 0, where sequential reads jumped to 22 GBps, while sequential writes climbed to 23 GBps.

The Spatium M570 Pro family uses the Phison PS5026-E26 controller, which we expect to see in the bulk of PCIe 5.0 SSDs released this year. The aforementioned T-Force Z54A used the Innogrit IG5666 controller. The SSD also uses 232-layer 2,400 MTs NAND. As with almost every PCIe 5.0 SSD we’ve seen so far, the M570 Pro features a beefy heatsink and a vapor chamber plate to maintain consistent performance under load. Without a sufficient cooling solution, PCIe 5.0 SSDs are highly susceptible to thermal throttling, which explains the elaborate setups in place. 

The less performant Spatium M570 (10,000 MBps for sequential reads and writes) is already available from retailers in 1TB and 2TB capacities. For example, the 2TB Spatium M570 costs $349.99 at Newegg. However, MSI has yet to elaborate on availability for the Spatium M570 Pro other than to say that it would be available in Q2, which is quickly coming to a close.

The Spatium M570 Pro Frozr and Frozr+ will be available in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities when they launch in Q3 2023, and we’re expecting that it will come with a generous pricing premium over their “non-Pro” sibling.

While CES, which occurs in January, is the world’s most well-known tech trade show, Computex Taipei is more important for PC hardware. Running this year from May 30th to June 2nd, the show will feature announcements and demos from major PC OEMs, component manufacturers and chip-makers. Because Taiwan is the home turf of many companies, including Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte, MSI and Acer, we’ll see some really important rollouts.

We’re attending the event and all the press briefings beforehand, so we can share the latest innovations with you, right from the show floor. To keep up with all the news, check out Computex 2023 hub.  

• Nvidia Keynote: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is giving this year’s Computex keynote, which takes place at 11 am local time on Monday (11 pm ET Sunday). Given that the RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti were just announced, we don’t expect Huang to talk much, if at all, about consumer GPUs. Instead, he’ll likely focus on the company’s advancements in AI and datacenter.  
  
  
• New laptops: Acer has already announced two new laptops that will be shown at Computex, but PC rollouts from MSI, Asus and Gigabyte are likely. Acer’s already-announced Swift Edge 16 uses a Ryzen 7040 chip so we bet other computers will use that processor. We also expect to see more laptops with PCIe 5.0 SSDs and RTX graphics inside.
  
  
• PCIe 5.0 SSDs Galore: In the past few weeks, we have just started to see the first PCIe 5.0 SSDs hit the consumer market and they’ve largely been powered by Phison’s E26 controller and top out around 12,000 MBps. We expect to see a wider variety of drives at Computex, including the TeamGroup T-Force Z54A, which uses an Innogrit IG5666 controller and promises to hit read speed of up to 14,365 MBps.
  
  
• More cooling, especially for SSDs: Those PCIe 5.0 SSDs can get really hot so we expect to see lots of crazy active cooling and liquid cooling for them. Adata will be showing off Project NeonStorm, which has self-contained water cooling and dual fans. We also expect to see some interesting new cooling solutions for CPUs and GPUs, which just keep getting hotter.
  
  
• Cool Cases: Computex is always a wonderful time for case debuts. Major case makers like Lian Li, Cooler Master and Thermaltake are all there showing off new wares and, often, special case mods. Thermaltake’s gallery of award-winning casemods is always a highlight of the show. 

As always, expect the unexpected from Computex and watch our hub page for more. 

Today at Amazon, the Crucial P3 2TB SSD is marked down to one of its best prices yet. This SSD usually goes for around $100 but right now is marked down to $88. It’s a PCIe Gen 3 SSD that uses 3D NAND. It comes in a range of capacities starting at 500 GB and getting as big as 4TB, however, this offer is only for the 2TB edition.

All of the drives in this line have an M.2 2280 form factor. We reviewed the Crucial P3 SSD when it debuted last fall and overall appreciated it. It’s supported with a good warranty and already had a low price point before today’s discount. This drive would be well-suited as a secondary drive for many users.

The Crucial P3 2 TB SSD uses an NVMe PCIe Gen 3 x4 interface to connect with. It can reach moderately high read/write speeds with Crucial indicating its cap to be around 3500/3000 MB/s. This speed is consistent also for the 1TB and 4TB models.

Users get a limited 5-year manufacturer’s warranty with the purchase that voids should the drive surpass 440 TBW. You can also take advantage of Amazon’s 30-day return policy.

Visit the Crucial P3 2TB 3D NAND M.2 SSD product page at Amazon for more information and purchase options. It’s not clear for how long the discount will be made available.

MSI has introduced its ultimate PCIe 4.0 solid-state drives that maximize sequential and random read and write performance to provide the best experience possible. MSI's Spatium M480 Pro SSDs are designed to maximize the storage performance of previous-generation PCIe Gen4-supporting platforms and will therefore be able to address tens of millions of PCs released in the last four years.

 Just like other members of MSI's Spatium M480 family, Spatium M480 Pro drives are based around Phison's PS5018-E18 platform and use 3D TLC NAND memory. But the M480 Pro SSDs feature up to 60% higher random read/write performance at a cost of a 44% higher peak power consumption. So it looks like the company reworked the firmware of these drives and quite possibly made some hardware-related changes too. 

Speaking of performance, with MSI's Spatium M480 Pro, we are looking at up to 7400 MB/s sequential read speed and up to 6000 MB/s sequential write speed, as well as up to 750K random read 4KB IOPS and up to 1M random write 4KB IOPS. This is significantly higher when compared to the performance of MSI's vanilla Spatium M480, which only delivers up to 350K/700K random read/write 4K IOPS. But this comes at an up to 9.5W maximum operating power, up from 6.6W in the case of the original model. So this drive definitely isn't going to be shipping in laptops. Other characteristics, such as TBW endurance, MTBF, and five-year limited warranty remain unchanged. 

MSI's Spatium M480 Pro vs Spatium M480

In addition to offering higher performance, the MSI Spatium M480 Pro omits a 500GB version and introduces a 4TB configuration, so these drives will be available with 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB of raw 3D NAND onboard.

MSI will offer three versions of its Spatium M480 Pro SSDs: the vanilla M480 Pro that comes with a thin graphene heatspreader to maximize compatibility with desktops and laptops, the M480 Pro HS that comes with a rather massive heatsink, and the M480 Pro Play that is optimized for Sony's PlayStation 4 and comes with an appropriate radiator. 

While some enthusiasts are lining up to get the best SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface to take advantage of their shiny new AMD Ryzen 7000 or Intel 12th and 13th Gen Core platforms, there is still life (and speed) in PCIe Gen4 systems. Since PCIe Gen5 platforms and appropriate drives are quite expensive, lots of enthusiasts might prefer to upgrade their current systems with a new graphics card and a higher-capacity, and still speedier SSD instead of investing in a brand-new platform.

Addressing the fleet of PCIe Gen4-supporting PCs waiting for an SSD upgrade makes a lot of sense, as many mainstream PCIe Gen4-supporting computers shipped with PCIe 3.0 or mediocre PCIe Gen 4 drives, in which case a drive like the M480 Pro would be a speedy and (in the case of the 4TB model at least) spacious upgrade.

Early samples of the Crucial T700 have the poise to be the fastest consumer SSD when the retail units hit the retail market on May 30. The T700 or one of its competitors will undeniably disrupt the list of the best SSDs very soon.

Corsair's competing MP700 recently got pushed into the spotlight due to several scenarios where reviewers tested the SSD without a cooler, contrary to Corsair’s recommendation. The publications didn’t conduct the tests in bad faith, but rather to see what would happen if a PCIe 5.0 was to operate without a heatsink or cooler. And the experiments exposed a flaw in the MP700’s firmware related to the thermal throttle curve. Phison’s firmware engineering team has quickly jumped on the issue and has prepared a firmware update fix that's currently going through internal validation.

The T700 and MP700 share similar components. Both SSDs use the Phison PS5026-E26 PCIe 5.0 controller and Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. In Crucial’s case, the T700 utilizes slightly faster NAND (clocked at 2,000 MT/s) than the (1,600 MT/s) variant in other E26-powered drives. The higher-binned NAND propels the T700 to sequential read and write speeds up to 12.4 GB/s and 11.8 GB/s. However, even though the T700 and MP700 use identical E26 controllers and similar Micron NAND, they don’t use the same firmware.

Larger and more prominent vendors have their own firmware teams working on SSD firmware. But smaller brands, or those not as heavily involved in the SSD realm, rely on reference firmware from the manufacturer. The rules vary by the SSD controller manufacturer. Some, like Silicon Motion, allow complete control over the firmware, while others don’t.

In Phison's case, the company does firmware customization for its customers; in this case, that would be Corsair and Crucial. As a result, the T700 and MP700 don't have the same firmware. The vendors do not make their firmware, and given that these two drives exhibit different failure mechanisms, it is safe to assume that the firmware is different. Regardless, clearly there was a flaw in the MP700 firmware. And the solution seems to be as easy as tweaking the thermal throttle curve. That's why Phison was able to cook up a fix so quickly.

Crucial's PCIe 5.0 drive hasn't suffered as drastic an issue, but that doesn't mean things are great with that drive if you run it without a cooler, either. German publication ComputerBase pointed out that the T700 suffered from thermal throttling in CrystalDiskMark when a heatsink wasn't cooling the drive. The SSD reportedly hit temperatures of 86 degrees Celsius. The SSD throttled hard, as evidenced by the low write speeds that stuck around the 100 MB/s mark. The publication's feedback aligns with our experience. Without a heatsink, our T700 sample performed fine in tests like DiskBench, but exhibited thermal throttling in longer benchmarks, such as CrystalDiskMark and IOmeter. The recorded average write performance after 15 minutes on the bare drive was 1,027 MB/s, down from the 3,681 MB/s on the one with the heatsink. Thermal throttling was working as expected. And honestly, when a drive is capable of  write speeds of nearly 12 GB/s, in most mainstream use cases, you aren't going to be writing to it for anything close to 15 minutes straight.

Crucial sells the T700 in two variants: as a bare drive and with a heatsink. The pricing difference is $30. However, the bare drive doesn't mean you should run the PCIe 5.0 SSD without a heatsink or cooler. In fact, Crucial, like Corsair, advises customers to use a heatsink with its PCIe 5.0 SSD.

The bare drive version targets consumers who plan to use your motherboard's integrated M.2 heatsink with the T700. It's similar to how Intel stopped bundling stock coolers with the chipmaker's K-series processors, since enthusiasts frequently ditched the stock cooler for an aftermarket cooler. Depending on the motherboard, CPU cooler, and graphics card choice, sometimes it's impossible to fit a beefy M.2 cooler into the mix. So while Crucial's T700 bare drive offers consumers an option to save $30, you should be sure your motherboard has a cooler that you can bolt onto the drive, especially if you're going to be hitting it with lots of sustained writes.

Corsair’s MP700 rivals the best SSDs around, and it’s also one of the few PCIe 5.0 SSDs in the retail market. However, consumers better heed Corsair’s listed requirements and put an M.2 heatsink or cooler on the MP700, as the drive can experience uncontrolled thermal shutdowns if pushed hard enough without one.

Phoronix and TechPowerUp have demonstrated what happens if consumers don’t adequately cool the Corsair MP700. Phoronix encountered malfunction issues in less than three minutes that caused the operating system to generate file system errors, implying that data corruption could result, while TechPowerUp saw thermal shutdowns in less than two minutes. We followed up with Phison, and the company issued the following statement to Tom’s Hardware:

“After carefully reviewing the recent reports from TechPowerUp and Phoronix, Phison would like to acknowledge the issue found in the reviews of products using the new Phison PS5026-E26 controller. We take this matter seriously and are committed to resolving it promptly. 

Our firmware engineering teams have already isolated the problem and made the necessary adjustments to the thermal throttle curve within hours of the report. However, the new firmware must undergo Phison’s strict validation process before our partners can release it to customers. Rest assured our partners will notify end-users as soon as the validated update is available.

It is important to note that all E26 SSDs shipped without a heatsink are intended to be used with a heatsink. Most motherboards shipping with PCIe Gen5 enabled also include cooling specifically designed for Gen5 SSDs. We offer the “bare drive” option to allow customers to use their existing cooling products.

We want to emphasize our commitment to providing high-quality products and solutions to our customers and will continue to work diligently to ensure their satisfaction. Thank you for your patience and understanding during this process.” - Phison representative to Tom's Hardware.

It’s no secret that PCIe 5.0 drives can run hot without active or passive cooling. Even Phison, the company that makes the E26 SSD controller for the Corsair SSD in question (and nearly all PCIe 5.0 SSDs, period), has previously stated that enthusiast PCIe 5.0 drives require active cooling. So it’s no coincidence that Phison shipped an active cooler with the first E26-powered drives. Many manufacturers commercialize their PCIe 5.0 SSDs with active coolers or beefy passive heatsinks.

The higher performance from PCIe 5.0 SSDs also means higher power consumption. In the case of the Corsair MP700, the drive has a typical power consumption of up to 10W. It performs within JEDEC’s maximum power limit specification of 11.55W for the M.2 slot. Nonetheless, the MP700 runs hot if left unattended, or your system has poor airflow. 

The MP700 has always been accompanied by a bulky cooling solution that resembled Phison’s reference design in early teasers. However, Corsair ultimately decided to scrap the cooler in the retail product. Instead, the company advises consumers to use the integrated M.2 heatsinks from their motherboards or invest in an aftermarket M.2 solution.

Phoronix noted that, without a passive heatsink installed, the MP700 was already causing file system errors while installing tests after a clean Ubuntu 23.04 installation. The Linux publication discovered that the MP700 would fail in under three minutes during benchmarks. The recorded temperatures via HWMON, a hardware monitoring utility, were approximately 87 degrees Celsius. For reference, Corsair rates the MP700 with an operating temperature of up to 70 degrees Celsius, so the drive was overheating. According to the error logs, the PCIe 5.0 SSD controller malfunctions at that temperature, causing the file system errors.

Meanwhile, TechPowerUp’s MP700 shut down after 86 seconds of reads. The SSD exhibited the same behavior after 55 seconds of writing. In both instances, the drive disappeared from the Device Manager in Windows, and the news outlet had to power cycle the system to get the MP700 back online. Surprisingly, the SSD didn’t suffer any data loss.

Phison has acknowledged that it's an issue with the firmware — the drive should throttle in a controlled manner. However, we suspect that the thermal throttle threshold was too conservative. Lowering the value should thermal throttle the drive before reaching the point of a thermal shutdown. Phison has a fix coming, and the new firmware is undergoing validation. The company didn't reveal when it'll be available, but SSD vendors will communicate the latest firmware to consumers when it's ready.

K. S. Pua, chief executive of Phison Electronics, said at a recent conference that further NAND price cuts were not viable and warned of potential bankruptcies among suppliers if the market does not recover. Despite the challenging market conditions, Phison remains focused on the development of NAND controllers, and will keep investing heavily in research and development, DigiTimes reports

Leading makers of 3D NAND — Kioxia, Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Western Digital — lost over $10 billion in flash memory as the companies had to cut down prices of already produced ICs, according to some estimates. Pua asserts that further price cuts are infeasible and cautioned that some suppliers may face bankruptcy if prices continue to decline, though he did not elaborate on whether he expects 3D NAND producers or SSD suppliers that buy flash memory to become insolvent. 

The head of Phison also suggests that there is a good chance that 3D NAND makers will further cut output to stabilize or even increase prices. In particular, Pua sees Micron's decision to stop cutting NAND prices as a collective effort among suppliers to stabilize the market. Phison, which develops controllers for some of the best SSDs available today, intends to refrain from future price cuts to maintain its gross margin, with a long-term goal of 27% (+/-3%), while continuing to expand its market share. 

Phison's Q1 revenue was NT$10.078 billion ($328.64 million), an 18% decrease from the previous quarter. However, due to a reduction of low-margin products and a better product mix, the company's gross profit reached NT$3.202 billion and the margin was 31.78%. Unfortunately for Phison, the company posted a loss of NT$550 million from its investment in Hosin Global Electronics, a supplier of SSDs and other NAND and DRAM-based products.

The chief executive of Phison anticipates losses of NAND suppliers to persist in the second quarter of 2023. But he sees them as a short-term challenge, so the company remains committed to maintaining its innovative edge and focusing on client services. To this end, the company will continue investing heavily in research and development, allocating over 80% of its annual expense budget to R&D. KS Pua reportedly said that while some of its rivals have cut their R&D spending, it has increased its investments in future products by 20%.

The Gigabyte Aorus 10000 was one of the first PCie 5.0 NVMe SSDs to be announced, and today this speedy SSD has finally landed on our test bench. It stands apart with an included optional heatsink, which has aesthetic appeal. With performance that peaks at 10 GB/s of sequential throughput, this drive has plenty of horsepower for demanding workloads. 

Gigabyte traditionally markets its SSDs to OEMs, and the Aorus 10000 is difficult to find at the time of review. Since the drive comes bare with the optional heatsink included, this could be a good choice if you want to use your own cooling solution or run multiple drives. However, it is not recommended to operate the drive bare, so laptops are generally out of the target applications. Gigabyte also offers additional software support for this drive which helps gives it a leg up over products like the Inland TD510. The real question is pricing: The drive has been listed at $399.99 for the 2TB model, but we aren’t sure if that is official pricing —Gigabyte has yet to share details.

Specifications

The Gigabyte Aorus 10000 is intended for sale at 1TB and 2TB. Performance can reach up to 10,000 / 9,500 MBps for sequential reads and writes with no official IOPS rating listed. The warranty is the standard 5-year with 700TB of writes per TB of drive capacity. The 10000 stands apart from other early PCIe 5.0 SSDs with its inclusion of a custom heatsink.

Software and Accessories

Besides including an optional heatsink, you can use your motherboard’s instead, Gigabyte also has a downloadable SSD toolbox. This application has basic functionality such as drive information, S.M.A.R.T., TRIM optimization, and secure erase. The drive is also supported in the Gigabyte Control Center. You can use free software like Clonezilla for cloning or imaging purposes.

A Closer Look

The included heatsink is quite robust and matches the aesthetic of the drive, although the height might cause issues in some builds. The overall design is effective and not too ridiculous. Gigabyte includes the necessary screw. The bare drive can be used with your own heatsink or, more likely, the M.2 heatsink available on your motherboard. It should not be used in a laptop or PlayStation 5 in its bare state.

The Aorus 10000 has the standard E26 layout with the SSD controller, a single DRAM package, and two NAND packages per side for a total of four. This is a sufficient number of packages to mount 8TB of the expected flash. There is also space for a second DRAM package on the rear, although 4GB of volatile memory should be plenty even for 8TB of NAND.

This uses the standard 4GB of SK hynix LPDDR4 and four packages of 512GB Micron 232-Layer TLC. Each package has four 1Tb, or 128GB, dies.

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Comparison Products

The Gigabyte Aorus 10000 competes against two other PCIe 5.0 SSDs, the Phison E26 ES and the Inland TD510. The Crucial T700 is still currently only for preview due to unfinished firmware, but we’ll have a full review soon. We also have several high-end PCIe 4.0 drives for comparison, including the Samsung 990 Pro, the Solidigm P44 Pro, the Adata Legend 960, the Corsair MP600 Pro LPX, the Crucial P5 Plus, the Gigabyte Aorus 7000s, and the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The Aorus 10000 is very fast in 3DMark, beating previous drives, with only the Inland TD510 able to keep pace. The Phison ES is an electronic sample, so this drive isn't available at retail. 

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The Aorus 10000 also does well in PCMark 10, although not quite as well as the E26 ES. The latter did have some quirks that needed ironing out for launch, but consistency and reliability come before outright performance, so peak performance can vary with shipping products. 

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The Aorus 10000 is outstanding in both ATTO and CrystalDiskMark with sequential reads and writes. It isn’t quite as fast in random IOPS, but the 4KB performance, on the whole, is good to great. This flash will need more time to mature. As it is, it’s designed for density and bandwidth first.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. 

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The Aorus 10000 writes at up to 10.2GBps in pSLC mode, 3.5GBps in TLC mode, and nearly 1.4GBps in its folding state. The real star of the show is the peak sequential write speed, but sustained write performance is not poor. We will likely see better things here in the future. pSLC recovery is slow for the up-to 220GB cache, but the drive is able to get back to its relatively good TLC performance mode without too much of a problem. If you’re interested in consistent, high sustained performance, some 4.0 drives remain equally or more viable, and at lower cost.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

The Aorus 10000 is simply not efficient. This is not as relevant for a drive of this type as it’s meant for fast burst performance and is an early adopter product. We will see more efficient drives later this year and next for laptops and other non-desktop devices. The Aorus 1000’s massive heatsink positions it primarily for high-end desktop use where efficiency is less of a concern.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Bottom Line

The Gigabyte Aorus 10000 is part of the welcoming committee for PCIe 5.0 SSDs. It’s not particularly impressive when considering what the 5.0 interface can produce in terms of total bandwidth, but it’s a good start. This is an early adopter product, but it still performs quite well on the whole with very high sequential performance. Performance is good, and it’s ready for DirectStorage when it actually arrives.

Gigabyte separates itself from the pack with an included optional heatsink that does not rely on the reference design. This drive is usable with your own heatsink or your motherboard’s M.2 heatsink. This is nice, but the question mark here is pricing. The Inland TD510 already exists with aggressive pricing, and there are faster drives in the pipeline. It is also challenging to find the Aorus 10000 in stock. Still, it’s a perfectly suitable product for what it is, being an excellent choice for enthusiasts who want the latest and greatest, particularly if their system matches the included heatsink.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs and Hard Drives

MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs

MORE: All SSD Content

Editor's Note: Phison has released a new firmware update to address issues with its E26 controller. SSDs using this controller could perform poorly and crash if overheated, and the new update addresses these concerns. Updated testing results are on page 2 and updated conclusion on page 3.

One of the worst experiences you can have is to find yourself playing games or creating content on your PC only to have it suddenly lag and then shut off. Maybe your secondary SSD, hosting your games or assets, disappears from Windows Explorer. If you’re lucky, no data is lost, and a simple reboot gets you back into the action. If you’re unlucky, you might be spending the rest of the day trying to fix your machine, recovering your data, and figuring out what happened.

For this reason, reliability is usually the most important factor for a storage drive, but if it’s also a super high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD you are also expecting consistent, top-tier performance. These early adopter drives are expensive, so the initial rumors of the drives shutting down from overheating were paid a lot of attention. It didn’t apply to just one drive but rather to any using Phison’s E26, the first consumer 5.0 SSD controller on the market. Concerns were definitely overblown as it has always been recommended to run a heatsink with these drives, and they primarily only overheat when that advice is ignored.

Still, it’s better to have a more graceful throttling procedure, especially because performance would tank with the original firmware if the drive remained in an overheated state. Phison quickly addressed these issues with improved firmware that prevented shutdown and also kept performance at a higher level whenever the drive throttles. We’re testing that today to see how well a Corsair MP700 handles the throttling state, as the drive would fall flat on its face if pushed to the limit at launch without a heatsink. We must state again that these drives should not be run without a heatsink in daily use, so this issue isn't really an issue at all if the drive is used as intended.

Phison calls its approach “link-state thermal throttling,” which works in part by reducing the SSD’s link speed. This means reducing the negotiated speed from PCIe 5.0 to a lower level, such as 4.0 or 3.0. Capping performance at a lower level in this way will improve efficiency and reduce power draw, which in turn helps the drive equalize to a lower temperature. This is not just useful when the drive massively overheats, as is the case when it’s run without a heatsink, but also if it’s throttling closer to the edge. It’s worth updating the firmware if you’re always tempting a critical temperature.

This line of thinking is not new. Negotiating a slower link speed or link width, the latter referring to the number of lanes is a good way to throttle a PCIe device. Traditional throttling can involve the PCIe link but essentially relies on delaying I/O, which effectively reduces throughput. Phison’s approach for this controller is more consistent and attempts to avoid extra latency by not handling it at a higher layer. Running an SSD like the MP700 without a heatsink is an edge case outside of normal operating procedure, but having a safety net is a good thing, assuming it works.

Original Review published May 3, 2023:

They may be a little late, but the first crop of PCIe 5.0 SSDs have finally arrived at retail. The Corsair MP700 is one of the first models, and its leading-edge performance of 10GB/s of sequential read throughput and 1.7 million random write IOPS is a good indicator of what we can expect from the new wave of drives.

The MP700 is a flagship-class PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD with good performance across the board, bringing enthusiast-class levels of storage performance to your desktop with high sequential bandwidth and all-around consistent performance. The drive also boasts good support from Corsair, a trusted name in SSDs.

The current crop of high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs are still good enough for the majority of users, though, and are far cheaper. There are also faster 5.0 drives coming out this year. However, the MP700 is a good way to get into the PCIe 5.0 game and have DirectStorage-optimized firmware ready to go. Pricing is likely to come down quickly, but if you want the absolute fastest drive around, this is it for the time being. Let's take a closer look.

Specifications

The Corsair MP700 is designed for 2TB and carries an MSRP of $289.99. This is slightly higher than the current price of the Inland TD510, a similar drive that has seen its price decline more than once since it launched. This means that PCIe 5.0 drives are already becoming more affordable.

The MP700 is rated for up to 10,000 / 9,500 MBps for sequential reads and writes and up to 1,500K / 1,700K IOPS for random reads and writes. In addition, it’s backed by a five-year warranty that includes up to 1,400 TB of written data. Corsair claims AES-256 support, which could be misleading; however, the design of this controller is such that some manufacturers may choose to implement optional features.

Software and Accessories

Corsair offers a download for its SSD Toolbox software on its site. This application displays drive information and SMART health attributes, plus allows you to TRIM, clone, overprovision, or to securely erase the drive.

A Closer Look

We had no issue running this SSD without the fan, but your own high-end cooling solution, purchased separately or as part of your motherboard’s features, should be more elegant.

Corsair apparently agreed — the company had originally announced the drive with a cooler but changed course and decided to release this as a bare drive without the reference cooler. However, it’s important to note that the drive should not be run bare, or it will eventually throttle. We tested with our own motherboard’s heatsink and verified that this type of cooling is more than sufficient.

This drive has two NAND packages on either side, for a total of four, as well as a controller and a DRAM package on the front. You should take care to select a cooler that can handle a double-sided drive, but there are plenty of options on the market, not to mention possibly built right into your motherboard.

We can also see the indomitable Phison E26 PCIe 5.0 SSD controller. It's an eight-channel controller with a bus of up to 2400 MT/s for the NAND packages, which suggests it could hit up to 15,000 MBps. As configured, the MP700 is closer to 1600 MT/s and 10,000 MBps.

The E26 has the same optional I/O+ firmware optimizations as the E18, although currently that only applies to the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G for PCIe 4.0 SSDs. These optimizations get the most out of DirectStorage and also improve sustained performance. The E26 is derived from an enterprise design, so this is a good match for sustained workloads, and it also has many more powerful but optional features.

The DRAM is Hynix H9HCNNNCPUMLCR-NEE, or LPDDR4. This is a low-power solution, and we saw some power savings with the even more efficient LPDDR4X on the Lexar Professional NM800 Pro. This is 32 Gb, or 4 GB, of DRAM, which is twice the expected amount. This was also the case with the reference design we previewed previously. There may be reasons for this decision, but we will have to test more E26 drives to get the full picture.

The NAND flash is labeled NV066, which is Micron TLC. This is its newest generation of flash at 232 layers, but it currently runs at 1600 MT/s for this drive. Peak rates will reach 2000 and 2400 MT/s with newer revisions.

Micron has gone from four to six planes with this design which helps improve performance due to greater internal parallelization. The flash dies used here are 1Tb or 128 GB each, so four dies in a QDP configuration for each of the four NAND packages. The use of denser dies means that SSDs can and will be able to reach higher capacities. Drives with 4TB of capacity should be common with the E26.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs and Hard Drives

MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs

MORE: All SSD Content

Comparison Products (Updated)

We are testing the Corsair MP700 in three configurations: with a heatsink using the original EQFM22.0 firmware, with a heatsink using the updated EQFM22.1 firmware, and without a heatsink with the updated firmware. We have added the Crucial T700 for good measure. The firmware is supposed to tackle situations where the drive overheats, which will be the case if it’s left without a heatsink for some workloads, but we emphasize that these drives should never be run bare.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

3DMark shows almost no difference regardless of heatsink or firmware.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

PCMark 10 also shows no difference. The T700, which has a higher I/O speed, does do a bit better in both tests.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

There’s no difference in DiskBench, either. The T700 remains somewhat faster.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

ATTO is the first benchmark where we see a difference if the heatsink is removed. As we approach larger block sizes, the drive reaches a sufficient temperature where it must begin to throttle. The drive’s performance beyond that state is relatively flat. This level of performance is poor, but it’s better than it was and is also better than the drive shutting off completely. The drive will still shut off completely if artificially heated, but in a normal state, it throttles more gracefully.

CDM also demonstrates what happens when the drive begins to overheat. We see random read latency spikes and sequential write performance tanks. Performance is still better than an HDD, but even with the updated firmware, you do not want to keep the drive in this state. Still, it’s significantly better than the drive hitting HDD speeds before shutting off, as is the case with the original firmware.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. 

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

One of the easiest ways to get an SSD to throttle is to hammer it with sustained writes. If the cooling cannot keep the drive below a critical temperature at equilibrium, performance will eventually become rocky. Even without a heatsink, the MP700 can write quite a bit in pSLC before throttling. Once it begins to throttle, the drive tries to balance its writes and internal temperature with a juggling act. The steady state performance is below 800 MB/s, which is actually not that bad when compared to many low-end or QLC-based SSDs.

The old firmware had the drive all but shut off as it would try to finish writing data before protecting itself by preventing further I/O. If the drive has some cooling, unlike our non-heatsinked scenario, it may play along the temperature edge and sustain higher performance than what is shown here. This is where the firmware is most useful, as you are not supposed to induce overheating or run the drive without a heatsink. If you simply have an environment and cooling solution where the drive may overheat a small amount in rare cases, you may not even notice throttling, or it will at least be less disruptive.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a 24C ambient.

Phison’s first PCIe 5.0 controller is known to run inefficiently and poorly at idle. The new firmware does not improve desktop idle, but it does seem to improve efficiency to some degree. Any gain is appreciated, but it is unlikely this controller will ever be efficient. The drive being more efficient without a heatsink could be in part chalked up to faster programming with high levels of heat, which is reflected in higher peak consumption. This test is brief with an SSD of this caliber, so it does not indicate long-term efficiency, and we do not recommend purposefully running a drive hotter for temporary gains.

With a heatsink, the MP700 remained quite cool in both cases. Without a heatsink, the drive quickly rose to 85C+, where it began to throttle, as shown in our benchmark results. Ideally, you would want the drive to peak at or below 75C for sufficient headroom to prevent throttling regardless of its state. You should always cool high-end SSDs as high temperatures can impact data retention, and throttling states can negatively impact performance and data integrity.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

 We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs. 

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs and Hard Drives

MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs

MORE: All SSD Content

Comparison Products (Updated)

We are testing the Corsair MP700 in three configurations: with a heatsink using the original EQFM22.0 firmware, with a heatsink using the updated EQFM22.1 firmware, and without a heatsink with the updated firmware. We have added the Crucial T700 for good measure. The firmware is supposed to tackle situations where the drive overheats, which will be the case if it’s left without a heatsink for some workloads, but we emphasize that these drives should never be run bare.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

3DMark shows almost no difference regardless of heatsink or firmware.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

PCMark 10 also shows no difference. The T700, which has a higher I/O speed, does do a bit better in both tests.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

There’s no difference in DiskBench, either. The T700 remains somewhat faster.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

ATTO is the first benchmark where we see a difference if the heatsink is removed. As we approach larger block sizes, the drive reaches a sufficient temperature where it must begin to throttle. The drive’s performance beyond that state is relatively flat. This level of performance is poor, but it’s better than it was and is also better than the drive shutting off completely. The drive will still shut off completely if artificially heated, but in a normal state, it throttles more gracefully.

CDM also demonstrates what happens when the drive begins to overheat. We see random read latency spikes and sequential write performance tanks. Performance is still better than an HDD, but even with the updated firmware, you do not want to keep the drive in this state. Still, it’s significantly better than the drive hitting HDD speeds before shutting off, as is the case with the original firmware.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. 

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

One of the easiest ways to get an SSD to throttle is to hammer it with sustained writes. If the cooling cannot keep the drive below a critical temperature at equilibrium, performance will eventually become rocky. Even without a heatsink, the MP700 can write quite a bit in pSLC before throttling. Once it begins to throttle, the drive tries to balance its writes and internal temperature with a juggling act. The steady state performance is below 800 MB/s, which is actually not that bad when compared to many low-end or QLC-based SSDs.

The old firmware had the drive all but shut off as it would try to finish writing data before protecting itself by preventing further I/O. If the drive has some cooling, unlike our non-heatsinked scenario, it may play along the temperature edge and sustain higher performance than what is shown here. This is where the firmware is most useful, as you are not supposed to induce overheating or run the drive without a heatsink. If you simply have an environment and cooling solution where the drive may overheat a small amount in rare cases, you may not even notice throttling, or it will at least be less disruptive.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a 24C ambient.

Phison’s first PCIe 5.0 controller is known to run inefficiently and poorly at idle. The new firmware does not improve desktop idle, but it does seem to improve efficiency to some degree. Any gain is appreciated, but it is unlikely this controller will ever be efficient. The drive being more efficient without a heatsink could be in part chalked up to faster programming with high levels of heat, which is reflected in higher peak consumption. This test is brief with an SSD of this caliber, so it does not indicate long-term efficiency, and we do not recommend purposefully running a drive hotter for temporary gains.

With a heatsink, the MP700 remained quite cool in both cases. Without a heatsink, the drive quickly rose to 85C+, where it began to throttle, as shown in our benchmark results. Ideally, you would want the drive to peak at or below 75C for sufficient headroom to prevent throttling regardless of its state. You should always cool high-end SSDs as high temperatures can impact data retention, and throttling states can negatively impact performance and data integrity.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

 We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs. 

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs and Hard Drives

MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs

MORE: All SSD Content

Comparison Products (Updated)

We are testing the Corsair MP700 in three configurations: with a heatsink using the original EQFM22.0 firmware, with a heatsink using the updated EQFM22.1 firmware, and without a heatsink with the updated firmware. We have added the Crucial T700 for good measure. The firmware is supposed to tackle situations where the drive overheats, which will be the case if it’s left without a heatsink for some workloads, but we emphasize that these drives should never be run bare.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

3DMark shows almost no difference regardless of heatsink or firmware.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

PCMark 10 also shows no difference. The T700, which has a higher I/O speed, does do a bit better in both tests.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

There’s no difference in DiskBench, either. The T700 remains somewhat faster.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

ATTO is the first benchmark where we see a difference if the heatsink is removed. As we approach larger block sizes, the drive reaches a sufficient temperature where it must begin to throttle. The drive’s performance beyond that state is relatively flat. This level of performance is poor, but it’s better than it was and is also better than the drive shutting off completely. The drive will still shut off completely if artificially heated, but in a normal state, it throttles more gracefully.

CDM also demonstrates what happens when the drive begins to overheat. We see random read latency spikes and sequential write performance tanks. Performance is still better than an HDD, but even with the updated firmware, you do not want to keep the drive in this state. Still, it’s significantly better than the drive hitting HDD speeds before shutting off, as is the case with the original firmware.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. 

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

One of the easiest ways to get an SSD to throttle is to hammer it with sustained writes. If the cooling cannot keep the drive below a critical temperature at equilibrium, performance will eventually become rocky. Even without a heatsink, the MP700 can write quite a bit in pSLC before throttling. Once it begins to throttle, the drive tries to balance its writes and internal temperature with a juggling act. The steady state performance is below 800 MB/s, which is actually not that bad when compared to many low-end or QLC-based SSDs.

The old firmware had the drive all but shut off as it would try to finish writing data before protecting itself by preventing further I/O. If the drive has some cooling, unlike our non-heatsinked scenario, it may play along the temperature edge and sustain higher performance than what is shown here. This is where the firmware is most useful, as you are not supposed to induce overheating or run the drive without a heatsink. If you simply have an environment and cooling solution where the drive may overheat a small amount in rare cases, you may not even notice throttling, or it will at least be less disruptive.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a 24C ambient.

Phison’s first PCIe 5.0 controller is known to run inefficiently and poorly at idle. The new firmware does not improve desktop idle, but it does seem to improve efficiency to some degree. Any gain is appreciated, but it is unlikely this controller will ever be efficient. The drive being more efficient without a heatsink could be in part chalked up to faster programming with high levels of heat, which is reflected in higher peak consumption. This test is brief with an SSD of this caliber, so it does not indicate long-term efficiency, and we do not recommend purposefully running a drive hotter for temporary gains.

With a heatsink, the MP700 remained quite cool in both cases. Without a heatsink, the drive quickly rose to 85C+, where it began to throttle, as shown in our benchmark results. Ideally, you would want the drive to peak at or below 75C for sufficient headroom to prevent throttling regardless of its state. You should always cool high-end SSDs as high temperatures can impact data retention, and throttling states can negatively impact performance and data integrity.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

 We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs. 

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs and Hard Drives

MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs

MORE: All SSD Content

Comparison Products (Updated)

We are testing the Corsair MP700 in three configurations: with a heatsink using the original EQFM22.0 firmware, with a heatsink using the updated EQFM22.1 firmware, and without a heatsink with the updated firmware. We have added the Crucial T700 for good measure. The firmware is supposed to tackle situations where the drive overheats, which will be the case if it’s left without a heatsink for some workloads, but we emphasize that these drives should never be run bare.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

3DMark shows almost no difference regardless of heatsink or firmware.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

PCMark 10 also shows no difference. The T700, which has a higher I/O speed, does do a bit better in both tests.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

There’s no difference in DiskBench, either. The T700 remains somewhat faster.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

ATTO is the first benchmark where we see a difference if the heatsink is removed. As we approach larger block sizes, the drive reaches a sufficient temperature where it must begin to throttle. The drive’s performance beyond that state is relatively flat. This level of performance is poor, but it’s better than it was and is also better than the drive shutting off completely. The drive will still shut off completely if artificially heated, but in a normal state, it throttles more gracefully.

CDM also demonstrates what happens when the drive begins to overheat. We see random read latency spikes and sequential write performance tanks. Performance is still better than an HDD, but even with the updated firmware, you do not want to keep the drive in this state. Still, it’s significantly better than the drive hitting HDD speeds before shutting off, as is the case with the original firmware.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. 

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

One of the easiest ways to get an SSD to throttle is to hammer it with sustained writes. If the cooling cannot keep the drive below a critical temperature at equilibrium, performance will eventually become rocky. Even without a heatsink, the MP700 can write quite a bit in pSLC before throttling. Once it begins to throttle, the drive tries to balance its writes and internal temperature with a juggling act. The steady state performance is below 800 MB/s, which is actually not that bad when compared to many low-end or QLC-based SSDs.

The old firmware had the drive all but shut off as it would try to finish writing data before protecting itself by preventing further I/O. If the drive has some cooling, unlike our non-heatsinked scenario, it may play along the temperature edge and sustain higher performance than what is shown here. This is where the firmware is most useful, as you are not supposed to induce overheating or run the drive without a heatsink. If you simply have an environment and cooling solution where the drive may overheat a small amount in rare cases, you may not even notice throttling, or it will at least be less disruptive.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a 24C ambient.

Phison’s first PCIe 5.0 controller is known to run inefficiently and poorly at idle. The new firmware does not improve desktop idle, but it does seem to improve efficiency to some degree. Any gain is appreciated, but it is unlikely this controller will ever be efficient. The drive being more efficient without a heatsink could be in part chalked up to faster programming with high levels of heat, which is reflected in higher peak consumption. This test is brief with an SSD of this caliber, so it does not indicate long-term efficiency, and we do not recommend purposefully running a drive hotter for temporary gains.

With a heatsink, the MP700 remained quite cool in both cases. Without a heatsink, the drive quickly rose to 85C+, where it began to throttle, as shown in our benchmark results. Ideally, you would want the drive to peak at or below 75C for sufficient headroom to prevent throttling regardless of its state. You should always cool high-end SSDs as high temperatures can impact data retention, and throttling states can negatively impact performance and data integrity.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

 We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs. 

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Comparison Products

We're bringing out the fastest SSDs we have in our lab to compare to the MP700, and that includes a few models we haven't yet reviewed. We included several PCIe 5.0 drives, like the Phison E26 Preview SSD as well as the Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 100000, Inland TD510, and Crucial T700 preview. The Corsair MP600 Core XT (which is also launching today) is also in the mix — it's a completely different level of performance and price.

Naturally, we're also comparing the Corsair MP700 to some of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs we've tested. These include the Samsung 990 Pro, the Solidigm P44 Pro, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, the Adata Legend 960, the Corsair MP600 Pro LPX, and the Crucial P5 Plus. 

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The MP700 is tied for the fastest retail-available drive we’ve ever tested in 3DMark, although the T700 we previewed is faster yet (the T700 firmware isn't final yet).

The MP700 matches the Phison E26 ES and beats all of the PCIe 4.0 drives handily, although the Samsung 990 Pro and P44 Pro are strong contenders.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The MP700 is again near the top of our rankings, this time in PCMark 10. Again, the 990 Pro and P44 Pro are the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The MP700 does exceptionally well in ATTO and has smoothed out the anomaly we saw with the Phison E26 ES during sequential write workloads. The CrystalDiskMark sequential performance for the MP700 matches the ES and, as expected, it easily beats all of the PCIe 4.0 drives.

Random 4KB read latency is excellent, but not as good as the 990 Pro. Samsung’s flash is quite good here, although compromises might have to be made with its next generation if string-stacking is required. The MP700 also has good random 4KB write latency, but it’s not the best. The peak IOPS at high queue depths are also impressive, but not the highest.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for over 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The 2TB MP700 writes in pSLC cache at up to 10.2 GBps for almost 22 seconds, showing it has a comfortable cache capacity of about 220 GB. This allows the drive to maintain a relatively high TLC write speed of 3.5 GBps. The Rocket 4 Plus-G demonstrates what can be done with a smallish cache and enough dies. The denser flash on the MP700 has 50% more planes, but there are also half as many die with which to interleave. There’s more performance to get out of this flash and the E26, as we see with the T700.

Eventually, despite the fast flash and small cache, a folding state is reached but writes still stay at up to 1.5 GBps. Recovery to TLC speeds are rapid, with good steady-state write performance of around 3.5 GBps.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

When we previewed the Phison E26, we were disappointed with its poor power efficiency. We figured this was one area that could see some improvement. The MP700 shows that this was not the case as it is equally underwhelming. Critics might say the idle power pull is overblown since ASPM/LPM is disabled, but this kind of drive won’t find its way naked into a laptop. There is work to be done here and we will see improvements with four-channel controllers and 7nm designs.

We are in the process of reworking how we manage temperature testing as current and future drives, starting with PCIe 5.0, are potentially more complex in this regard. Heatsinks are becoming more substantial in size and can even use active cooling. Motherboards are coming with more elaborate heatsinks for M.2 drives, too. Bare drives only make sense if purchased to add a heatsink of this or another type. Throttling impacts performance. Therefore, testing must be adjusted to account for this future.

The MP700, for its part, is designed to thermal throttle beginning at 76C, scaling thereafter. We did not see any throttling during testing with our solution, though we're using a large and well-ventilated case coupled with a large heatsink from the motherboard. A compact mini-ITX case might struggle more to keep thermals in check, depending on other components.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Bottom Line

The Corsair MP700 is the first PCIe 5.0 SSD we’ve officially reviewed, though it's similar in most respects to the Phison E26 preview ES. As you can see, we've also put several other PCIe 5.0 SSDs through our test suite to give you a taste of its relative performance against other competing drives.

The MP700 matched or exceeded the Phison ES, Inland TD510, and Aorus Gen 5 100000 with no real surprises, providing the fastest sequential performance possible. The MP700's overall performance and consistency were also quite good, and the heatsink on our motherboard was sufficient to keep the drive cool. That said, the MP700 is a power-hungry beast for the desktop user who wants the most horsepower, so you'll need to ensure you have a proper motherboard M.2 heatsink or purchase a capable cooler at retail.

It's noteworthy that Corsair has a solid reputation for offering good support and has a long track record in the SSD market, which could be an important factor as other manufacturers release similar drives.

These initial PCIe 5.0 drives require a compliant motherboard to reach peak performance, so they're confined to the newest systems on the market. We haven't yet seen the maximum attainable performance over PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Faster flash, and thus faster drives, are on the horizon. For instance, we recently posted a preview of the Crucial T700 SSD that reaches higher peak sequential performance than the MP700. We conducted the T700 tests with firmware that wasn't final, so there might be a few changes with the final production-ready drives.

SSD prices have been coming down rapidly, so the premium for PCIe 5.0 SSDs also needs to be reduced. This will happen as more of these drives come out, particularly as faster drives built on the Phison E26 controller are already on the horizon. Optional features and DirectStorage optimization are still nice to have, but the initial crop of PCIe 5.0 SSDs still feel like early adopter products. There’s not enough of a leap over still very fast, much cheaper PCIe 4.0 drives to justify the pricing premiums we've seen — at least not for now. In the meantime, the Corsair MP700 is a solid entrant that delivers leading-edge performance that you can find at retailers today. 

Updated Bottom Line

Phison saw a problem with its product and decided to come up with a somewhat unique approach to fix it. In this, they were successful, as the drive did not quit on us, and its steady state performance is relatively high for a massively throttling device. It’s clear that the SSD is not meant to be run without additional cooling - as every manufacturer is making clear on the box, on their site, in the manual, etc. - but it’s good to know there is a failsafe. It’s still possible to make the drive shut off if it’s artificially overheated, but with proper use, that should not be a problem. Further, even if the drive does hit a throttling state it should be able to maintain reasonable levels of performance if such a condition is mild or temporary.

On the other hand, there are other improvements we would like to see, such as improved energy efficiency and especially lower power consumption when the drive is idle. We test idle in desktop or performance conditions, but the power draw is still way too high. Additionally, Phison has hyped up its throttling solution when these drives run unquestionably hot. Phison’s approach is also not entirely novel and could use further refinement. It gets the job done, and we do recommend updating your drive’s firmware, but there’s still room for improvement.

More generally, there has been a lot of concern about the power draw and heat output of high-end SSDs. 7nm controllers and more efficient flash will help this situation a lot, especially when bandwidth can be provided by DRAM-less, four-channel solutions. If we look at PCIe 4.0 drives like the Lexar NM790 and Addlink A93 we see what can be achieved. SSD manufacturers are improving their heatsink designs, and motherboard manufacturers are designing their boards for high-end SSDs, in part with assistance from Phison. Even the M.2 spec is seeing some possible changes, so these issues can be addressed.

Even if there will always be super-fast, cutting-edge drives, throttling improvements are being developed simultaneously. We’ve seen this on the WD Black SN850X, the Samsung 990 Pro, and many other drives with adaptive thermal management. DirectStorage workloads will also require improvements to sustained performance which will necessitate better drive management. For the time being, Phison’s solution is satisfactory for the enthusiast who wants maximum bandwidth, but there’s more to come.

In the short term, it is recommended to stay on top of developments such as this firmware-based solution. Unfortunately, not all SSD vendors that use Phison's controller have released this new firmware yet, but we can expect to see them release new variants over time. In the meantime, maintain your SSD and keep it cool, both with a heatsink and by using a ventilated case. Avoid high-end drives where they aren’t necessary. Choose a drive based on your needs rather than what’s reported as being the fastest. There are plenty of drives out there that won’t break the bank or overheat. The SSD market is wide, and prices are low, so be sure to shop around and keep an eye on our reviews to determine which drive is right for you.

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Crucial is preparing to launch its ultra-fast T700 SSD, which is now available to pre-order starting at $209.99 for the 1TB model. The drive is currently the world's fastest Gen 5 SSD, surpassing all of the SSDs on our list of best SSDs with read speeds of nearly 12 GB/s. The drive launches later this month, on May 30.

The T700 is a PCIe Gen 5.0 x4 NVMe M.2 SSD, rated for up to 12,400 MB/s in sequential read speeds, and up to 11,800 MB/s in sequential write speeds, as well as random read speeds and write speeds of up to 1,500K. It's a double-sided 2280 M.2 drive featuring Phison's bleeding-edge E26 controller, 4GB of LPDDR4 memory, and Microsoft DirectStorage API.

Performance will vary depending on the drive capacity you choose: the 1TB model will feature slightly lower read and write speeds (11,700 MB/s sequential read speeds, 9,500MB/s sequential write speeds, 1,350K random read speeds, 1,400K random write speeds, as well as an endurance rating of 600TB). The 2TB and 4 TB both get the faster drive speeds mentioned earlier, with the only difference being the drive endurance — which is rated at 1,200TB for the 2TB model and 2,400TB for the 4TB model.

We previewed the drive two weeks ago, and found it indeed lives up to its superlative as the world's fastest SSD. The prototype T700 we received outperformed every single SSD we've tested so far, including the Phison PS5026 engineering sample, Aorus Gen 5 10000, Samsung 990 Pro, and more in a plethora of tests including DiskBench, PCMark 10, and 3DMark. We expect the production version to perform just as well — if not better — than the prototype version we tested.

Unsurprisingly, Crucial's new SSD won't come cheap and cost roughly twice what PCIe Gen 4 drives go for these days. The drive will start at $179.99 for the 1TB model, while the 2TB model will cost $339.99, and the 4TB model will cost a whopping $599.99. Heatsink versions of the T700 will cost an additional $30 on top of the initial price.