Competition is heating up in the storage world as new PCIe Gen4 SSDs enter the market. While Phison was first to market with a PCIe Gen4 SSD and led the industry with chart-topping performance, the PS5016-E16 controller has been recently dethroned by newer, faster rivals. Phison's new E18 SSD controller looks to recapture the lead, though.
Phison’s current-gen PS5016-E16 has been outclassed by the likes of Samsung and its powerhouse 980 PRO. With speeds of 7/5 GBps and the ability to sustain 1 million IOPS, the 980 Pro easily outshines E16-powered SSDs.
Additionally, rival SSD-controller maker Silicon Motion just announced its new PCIe 4.0 controllers, the SM2264 and SM2267, and products like Adata’s XPG Gammix S50 Lite are already hitting shelves (we're already testing it in our labs).
Phison isn’t sitting idly by, though; The company is busy tweaking its new E18 controller to fend off the new challengers. As the second-gen PS5018-E18 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.4 SSD controller nears the final stages of development, the company gave us an exclusive glimpse of its current capability – and the results are more than impressive.
While Samsung’s ability to sustain upwards of 1 million IOPS was impressive, Phison’s test lab has now posted speeds in excess of 1.2 million IOPS with the E18 controller.
The company didn't tell us about any specific tweaks it used to attain these speeds or share details of the test platform, but we do know that these results are based on a 2TB engineering sample armed with Micron’s 512Gb B27B 96-Layer TLC flash.
The results are miles ahead of the first Phison E18 results that surfaced last month, and even faster than the results that surfaced earlier this week. With performance results getting faster seemingly weekly and Phison already sampling silicon to its customers, it appears that we'll soon have new speedy third-party SSDs hitting the market that can trade blows with, or beat, the best SSDs on the market.
