Friday, September 13th 2024
Silicon Motion's SM2508 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD Controller is as Power Efficient as Promised
The first reviews of Silicon Motion's new PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD controller, the SM2508 are starting to appear online, and the good news is that the controller is as power efficient as promised by the company. Tom's hardware has put up their review of a reference design M.2 SSD from Silicon Motion and in their testing, equipped with 1 TB of Kioxia's 162-layer BiCS6 TLC NAND. It easily bests the competition when it comes to power efficiency. In their file copy test, it draws nearly two watts less than its nearest competitor and as much as three watts less than the most power hungry drive. It's still using about one watt more than the best PCIe 4.0 drives, but it goes to show that the production nodes matters, as the SM2508 is produced on a 6 nm node, compared to 12 nm for Phison's E26.
We should point out that the peak power consumption did go over nine watts, but only one of the Phison E26 drives managed to stay below 10 watts here. The most power hungry PCIe 5.0 SSD controller in the test, the InnoGrit IG5666 peaks at nearly 14 watts for comparison. Idle power consumption of the SM2508 is also very good, still drawing more than the PCIe 4.0 drives it was tested against, but far less than any of the other PCIe 5.0 drives. What about performance you ask? The reference drive places itself ahead of all the Phison E26 drives when it comes to sequential file transfers, regardless if it's to or from the drive. Random read IOPS also places right at the top, but it's somewhat behind when it comes to random writes, without being a slow drive by any means. Overall we're looking at a very promising new SSD controller from Silicon Motion with the SM2508 and TPU has also received a sample that is currently undergoing testing, so expect a review here soon.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
We should point out that the peak power consumption did go over nine watts, but only one of the Phison E26 drives managed to stay below 10 watts here. The most power hungry PCIe 5.0 SSD controller in the test, the InnoGrit IG5666 peaks at nearly 14 watts for comparison. Idle power consumption of the SM2508 is also very good, still drawing more than the PCIe 4.0 drives it was tested against, but far less than any of the other PCIe 5.0 drives. What about performance you ask? The reference drive places itself ahead of all the Phison E26 drives when it comes to sequential file transfers, regardless if it's to or from the drive. Random read IOPS also places right at the top, but it's somewhat behind when it comes to random writes, without being a slow drive by any means. Overall we're looking at a very promising new SSD controller from Silicon Motion with the SM2508 and TPU has also received a sample that is currently undergoing testing, so expect a review here soon.
27 Comments on Silicon Motion's SM2508 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD Controller is as Power Efficient as Promised
The SM2508 shouldn't need active cooling, just like PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 drives.
There's also an issue with using PCIe 5.0 drives in laptops, as they'll have a negative affect on the battery life.
Outside of that, I guess not.
Cost I'm guessing, but I would have thought that given the push for 3nm, 5nm would be more cost effective by now.
Battery life is another possible reason.
Didn't think 10-15 watts was such a big deal to cool, but when you're dealing with a very small surface area it makes sense.
It's definitely more efficient than the rest of the Gen5 drives, which is nice I guess. I don't think efficiency is a huge issue when it comes to most peoples use-cases, which is why I imagine companies haven't been pushing for more efficient nodes, as that will up the cost of the drives themselves.
As a point of reference, has anyone thoroughly tested the 990 EVO's power draw?
There were some leaks about a 4-channel controller from SMI (SM2504XT), you too reported on that, but that was a year and a half ago. It's surprising that they haven't announced anything by now.
More heat in the computer case and less thermal budget for graphic cards and processor. which results in higher fan speeds of any computer fan. which results in a hotter gaming room in summer.
-- I have a KC3000 2TB drive. A newer drive should use less power and be faster for any task in the 2TB size category.
A GPU running at 50C and pulling 100w of power will put out 10x the heat into the chassis that the 99C 10w SSD is doing.Biggest issue is just requiring stupid large heatsinks or tiny fans to keep them from throttling, neither is desirable.
The drive tested is a reference design and most likely a controller validation platform, not a product that's likely to appear in retail.
As such, we should also be able to expect better performance from the controller when paired with faster/better NAND.So far, there hasn't been any tangible benefits. I haven't wasted my money on a PCIe 5.0 SSD.Good memory there, yeah, no idea what happened to that, but as we know, roadmaps changes sometimes.
My biggest time sink is cloning system for back-up.
Because of throttling, the data transfer is only slightly better then SATA.
It usually takes about 2 hours for clonezilla to create and check a back-up.
It is worth doing, but I wish the hardware was faster.