Silicon Power Has Two New NVMe SSDs

Silicon Power announced two NVMe SSDs, the first for the company, based on the Phison PS5008-E8T DRAMless controller. Both drives share the same specifications and come with identical components from what we can tell. One carries a three-year warranty and the other comes with a five-year warranty. 

This is the first Phison PS5008-E8T retail product announcement that we've seen, and it comes on the heels of several companies shipping the PS5008-E8 armed with a DRAM cache. The E8T controller makes up for the lack of a DRAM to cache the table map by using a small amount of your host system memory (your RAM) to map the location of data on the flash. Support for Host Memory Buffer was added to Windows 10 in the Fall Creators Update in the last quarter of 2017.

Silicon Power didn't give us many performance details about the two new NVMe SSDs. The only performance numbers listed are sequential reads at 1,600 MB/s and sequential writes at 1,000 MB/s. The performance increase with each capacity increase, but we suspect the 1,600/1,000 rating is only for the largest model, 512GB. The P32A80 and P32A85 ships in three sizes, 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB.

The company does list a number of features for this series, such as being the "perfect SSD for Ultrabook Upgrades", easy installation, and the warranty for each model. The feature that caught us off guard is the mention of RAID. We've yet to see the HMB feature supported on Intel's PCH chipset RAID or in the new vROC system that uses the CPU as a RAID controller with support for RAID 0, 1, and 5. RAID with HMB-enabled SSDs should work with Microsoft's Storage Spaces, a pure software array. This is an area we will have to explore in the future.

Silicon Power didn't list any recommended prices or dates for availability.