At Computex, Phison was showing off two interesting drive families. SemiAccurate thinks the impending PCIe6 devices are the ones to watch, bring them on.
SSDs aren’t usually the stuff of high drama, since the early days when SandForce maxed out the eSATA bus with their first offering on a new spec, headlines have been rather muted. Sure there are real advances, especially when a new bus hits the market, but it quickly becomes a game of power use minimization and nuance advances. This is all welcome but, well, it isn’t anything for the enthusiast to have heart palpitations over.
The new E37T drives performs
That brings us to the nuance from Phison this Computex, the E37T or PS5037-E37T to use it’s formal name. This is a new DRAM-less PCIe5 SSD that hits 14.9GBps sequential read performance and 13.2GBps sequential read. Not bad for DRAM-less devices but the real story here is power, and not the claimed <2.3W active power but the real peak draw. That would be ~4.5W which is pretty darn good for a PCIe5 drive at those speeds. We will spare you the graphs but the data SemiAccurate saw backs up both numbers completely.
And yes we know that the picture shows 14.3 and 13.6GBps read/write, and yes we know Phison is not being totally truthful about their claimed speeds. How do we know? Other runs of the same test showed peak scores that rounded to 15.0 and 14.3GBps so we applaud Phison for using numbers that appear to be a bit more realistic than the best they have ever seen. The E37T comes in capacities up to 8TB for now.
The new X3 PCIe6 controller based SSDs
Better yet we have a PCIe6 device or two, not just mockups but real devices. Phison had two PCIe6 enterprise drives on display both with and without cases in E3.S and E1.S form factors. The ones above were obviously the case-free version, and since they are reference designs, expect OEMs to… err.. have different stickers on their versions since the form factor is pretty regulated.
Better yet Phison was showing their bare PCIe6 controller called the X3. It is a 4-lane NVMe 2.3 chip that is OCP v2.6 compliant. We will skip all the enterprise compliance bits but you can be pretty sure the X3 meets all your needs in that regard, and it will support up to 2PB per controller.
So how does it perform, in theory anyway since the drives aren’t final nor are the devices they plug in to. Phison quotes 28K MBps for sequential read and write, 6.8K IOPS for random read and write with a power efficiency of 4MBps/W. All of these things are a claimed 2x higher than their PCIe5 controller which isn’t a surprise because the bus they are on is 2x faster.
Parsing the numbers a bit more two things stand out. First is that the efficiency rating of 2x better, something we believe, means the device is about the same power as current PCIe5 SSDs. This is a good thing but we don’t see anyone with a PCIe6 system starting out with PCIe5 drives then upgrading. That said if the power numbers hold, current PCIe5 system could drop power use by a noticeable amount if specced with X3 based drives. SemiAccurate expects PCIe6 drives to be on the market long before PCIe6 systems, that is the way it always is.
Last up we come to Phison phudging the numbers again. They claim 6.8K IOPS for the X3 and 3.3K IOPS for the PCIe5 version, again we believe both to be true. Unfortunately they then claim it is a 2x increase in performance which isn’t true, it is a 2.1x upgrade! (Note: 2.0606 rounds to 2.1 not 2.0) So there you have it, Phison does it twice in a single event. It tells you a lot about a company when their public claims are worse than reality, it is both refreshing and uncommon to see honesty in modern marketing. Well done Phison.S|A
Charlie Demerjian
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