At CES 2025, we found the SSD controller that will spur high-end NVMe Gen 5 SSD adoption. Until now, high-end Gen 5 SSDs were driven by Phison's E26 series controller that the company built on TSMC's 12 nm process. The company on Monday launched the new E28 series controller (full name PS5028-E28). This chip is built on the much more advanced TSMC 6 nm process. The new process lets Phison to significantly lower the electrical cost of its NAND flash interface serializer-deserializer, and step up performance closer to the interface limits of PCI-Express 5.0 x4. The controller offers sequential speeds of up to 14.5 GB/s, which is an increase from last year's E26 Max14um variant.

The company showed us the bare E28 controller chip, and a reference-design SSD based on it. Not much to report, except that the drive lacked any cooling solution. Production SSDs powered by the E28 will still need heatsinks to achieve optimal performance, although they won't run as hot as drives powered by the E26. The company didn't have any performance demo stations set up with this drive.At CES, Phison also announced that its mid-range NVMe Gen 5 DRAMless controller, the E31T, gained support for Micron's new G9 series NAND flash. Phison showed off an unreleased Crucial P510 SSD, which combines the G9 flash with this latest variant of the E31T, and has a fairly thin passive cooling solution. A demo station was set up for this drive, where it was shown scoring 11 GB/s reads and 8.6 GB/s writes, along with 5.9 GB/s reads in 4K random access with QD32.Lastly, we were shown the Pascari D205V, a 2.5-inch enterprise SSD with a U.2 Gen 5 x4 interface. The drive comes with a maximum capacity of an astonishing 122.88 TB, which it achieves using QLC NAND flash. In terms of performance, you're looking at sequential read speeds of up to 14.6 GB/s reads, with up to 3.2 GB/s sequential writes; up to 3 million IOPS 4K random reads, and up to 35,000 IOPS 4K random writes. The drive is hence optimized for cloud storage data-center application with warm-to-hot data.