Silicon Motion, Inc.'s SM2262, SM2263, and variants will be ready by Q4 2017 (barring any delays), but that hasn't stopped companies from talking about upcoming products a little early.
The attraction for these controllers comes from Silicon Motion, Inc. not being tied to a single NAND manufacturer. As a third-party controller design house, the company sells controllers and builds firmware for companies not fortunate enough to own a fab or related IP. SSDs from companies like Colorful keep prices in check and ensure fair market conditions that help to push performance with each new release.
Colorful CP600 iGame Edition
The new flagship NVMe SSD features the SMI SM2262 controller with capacities up to 2TB. The CP600 iGame Edition is said to achieve up to 3GB/s sequential read and 1.7GB/s sequential write speeds. Random performance comes to 370,000 read and 300,000 write IOPS. Colorful tells us this model will feature a unique RGB LED feature to bring more color to the Colorful brand. We expect this series to include a five-year warranty and offer capacity sizes from 480GB to 2TB.
Colorful CN600 DRAM Edition
The Colorful CN600 DRAM Edition uses the SMI SM2263 mainstream NVMe controller with a DRAM buffer to deliver up to 2.4GB/s sequential read and 1.7GB/s sequential write speeds. Colorful didn't list random performance in the press release, but SMI told us at Flash Memory Summit last month to expect up to 300,000 read and 270,000 write IOPS from this controller. The CN600 DRAM Edition will ship in capacities of 240GB to 1TB.
Colorful CN600
Colorful's entry-level NVMe SSD will come in the form of a DRAMless design that supports Window's Host Memory Buffer technology. The feature comes from SMI's SM2263XT controller and will use a small portion of your system memory (up to 24MB) to cache the flash translation layer table map. The potent combination allows the entry-level NVMe CN600 to read sequential data at 2GB/s and write up to 1.6GB/s. This series will ship in capacity sizes from 240GB to 1TB.
Colorful didn't give us any pricing details. If it did, the numbers would most likely not be in U.S. Dollars; some Colorful SSDs do sell in the U.S. through gray markets, but the company focuses on Asian markets. Don't let that discourage you. In the coming months, we should hear from several companies excited to show off NVMe designs capable of competing with Samsung's 960 series.
| Controller | SM2263 | SM2263XT | SM2262 | SM2262EN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Host Interface | PCIe 3.0 x4 | PCIe 3.0 x4 | PCIe 3.0 x4 | PCIe 3.0 x4 |
| PCIe Protocol | NVMe 1.3 | NVMe 1.3 | NVMe 1.3 | NVMe 1.3 |
| NAND Flash Channels | 4 | 4 | 8 | 8 |
| CE/Channels | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| DRAM | Yes | No | Yes | yes |
| Host Memory Buffer | No | Yes | No | No |
| Sequential Read | 2,400 MB/s | 2,400 MB/s | 3,200 MB/s | 3,500 MB/s |
| Sequential Write | 1,700 MB/s | 1,700 MB's | 1,900 MB/s | 3,000 MB/s |
| Random Read | 300,000 IOPS | 280,000 IOPS (HMB)140,000 IOPS (No-HMB) | 370,000 IOPS | 370,000 IOPS |
| Random Write | 250,000 IOPS | 250,000 IOPS | 300,000 IOPS | 300,000 IOPS |
