Phison E31 PCIe 5.0 SSD Engineering Sample Preview

[Chris_Ramseyer]

Size limited to 2TB? It is pointless...

It scales beyond 2TB. We are not talking about 4TB or 8TB at this time, but both capacities are possible. Also, we will increase sustained write speed above 2GB/s in the next FW update (well before retail drives ship).

Thanks W1zzard for your article! We aim to make E31T your (and your reader's) next workhorse SSD.

 

[Legacy-ZA]

Maybe Phison has hit the wall and we see more using that SM controller in the future.

The only "Wall" there is, is the one they control, all of them, and it's not so much the price that annoys me, but the fact that they keep progress back for decades so they can milk every last drop from the custome... I mean, consumers wallet.

I am sick of it.

 

[bug]

You overlooked something, and @W1zzard didn't point it out either: this SSD is as bare as it gets, without even a graphene sticker. It's a prototype after all, and it can't be considered as fit for regular use in a desktop (where you have many options to cool it) or a notebook (where a sticker is the least, and possibly the most, that you can apply).

Prototype or retail, sticker or not, the controller will overheat the same. Only if algorithms change to reduce the workload will the heat output be affected.

 

[Ferrum Master]

It scales beyond 2TB. We are not talking about 4TB or 8TB at this time, but both capacities are possible.

It should be clearly clarified and W1z should be provided with a controller datasheet preview if you go public sharing a engineering sample. Competition is pretty high currently, it would be suicidal waste of silicon otherwise.

As usual current mainstream PC amounts of PCIe lanes are scarce especially gen5, you simply don't want to waste that slot with low capacity drives in 2024 and in reality 2025, look at the game install sizes.

I will edit my post.

 

[_roman_]

Right now there's no killer feature that requires the sequential speeds of NVMe drives.

For myself it's backup speed. There was a big time improvement changing from usb 3 SATA to usb 3 NVME bridge when both are using SSDs.
I prefer better / bigger write and read speeds for any scenario. Most newer drives can not do that.


I own Crucial P5 Plus 1TB, as in the charts, and KC3000 2TB as in the charts. I expect 140% or higher results in comparison with those old budget drives. i expect to see those results on different hardware review websites over the full product life cycles without a change in the components soldered on the printed circuit board. We are talking about an expensive drive with the super duper PCIE 5.0 connection - not a budget PCIE 4.0 drive. This result should show with different fill status on the drive not only in windows 11 Pro, e.g. without TRIM, ...

 

[Chrispy_]

For myself it's backup speed. There was a big time improvement changing from usb 3 SATA to usb 3 NVME bridge when both are using SSDs.
I prefer better / bigger write and read speeds for any scenario. Most newer drives can not do that.


I own Crucial P5 Plus 1TB, as in the charts, and KC3000 2TB as in the charts. I expect 140% or higher results in comparison with those old budget drives. i expect to see those results on different hardware review websites over the full product life cycles without a change in the components soldered on the printed circuit board. We are talking about an expensive drive with the super duper PCIE 5.0 connection - not a budget PCIE 4.0 drive. This result should show with different fill status on the drive not only in windows 11 Pro, e.g. without TRIM, ...

Oh yeah, backups are where QLC drives completely fall over as you have a huge quantity of data likely coming off another SSD. It's even more important with an external drive that you have fast native write speed to the NAND after the pSLC mode fills up, since the drive can't fold pSLC to native TLC/QLC once it's unplugged.

I always forget that people might be using an SSD for local backups.

On desktops you can tame these SSDs with massive heatsinks(many motherboards these days come with decent sized heatsinks on primary slot) and airflow. Problem is going to be in laptops(someone is going to blink on that side of things and put these hot gen5 drives in there) where there is limited cooling potential available.

Yeah, that's not so much of an issue right now because even the very latest Strix Point mobile CPUs are only Gen4. Lunar lake is the newest CPU coming to market and while that has 4 Gen5 lanes and 4 Gen4 lanes, the storage lanes are Gen4.

Gen5 would seem to be so overkill, power-hungry, and uncoolable for a laptop that not even the CPU manufacturers are bothering to add it yet. The E31 helps with that, but it's still going to be throttle-town, for sure.

 

[Gpgl]

A nice review of an interesting engineering sample! At least the new Controller is more efficient than the E26. No reasons to upgrade from a 990 Pro for me yet though.
The bottom of page 2 has a writing mistake by the way. It says: "Each chip has a capacity of 1 GB." I think thats meant to be 1 TB.

 

[W1zzard]

The bottom of page 2 has a writing mistake by the way. It says: "Each chip has a capacity of 1 GB." I think thats meant to be 1 TB.

Fixed

 

[kapone32]

I must have installed over a hundred MX500 SSDs, (most of them 2.5") but they're always SATA, right?

Don't get me wrong, they're decent SATA drives but aren't we at the point now where trying to buy a SATA drive instead of an NVMe drive is a fool's errand? IIRC they were completely outclassed by the SN550 and at a lower price something like half a decade ago?

Yep nice and cheap with better performance than you expected.

 

[chrcoluk]

They getting there, gen 5 now moved from alpha to beta. Still not good enough though.

Perhaps manufacture on 3nm and halve the clock speeds of the controller?

 

[Chris_Ramseyer]

Oh yeah, backups are where QLC drives completely fall over as you have a huge quantity of data likely coming off another SSD. It's even more important with an external drive that you have fast native write speed to the NAND after the pSLC mode fills up, since the drive can't fold pSLC to native TLC/QLC once it's unplugged.

I always forget that people might be using an SSD for local backups.


Yeah, that's not so much of an issue right now because even the very latest Strix Point mobile CPUs are only Gen4. Lunar lake is the newest CPU coming to market and while that has 4 Gen5 lanes and 4 Gen4 lanes, the storage lanes are Gen4.

Gen5 would seem to be so overkill, power-hungry, and uncoolable for a laptop that not even the CPU manufacturers are bothering to add it yet. The E31 helps with that, but it's still going to be throttle-town, for sure.

I have an MSI Raider notebook and it has a Gen5x4 and Gen4x4 M.2 slots. It's a cool notebook that runs great with an E31T inside.

Someone mentioned the lack of information on 4TB and 8TB. We are just not releasing that information at this time. Developing smaller capacities first is common, especially when working with mainstream products.

 

[Chrispy_]

I have an MSI Raider notebook and it has a Gen5x4 and Gen4x4 M.2 slots. It's a cool notebook that runs great with an E31T inside.

Is it a Lunar Lake laptop?

Just curious as Intel's specs for that show it has just 8 lanes of PCIe in total and you're saying that your MSI raider has all of those dedicated to the M.2 slots which would be possible if it didn't have a dGPU at all and MSI had repurposed the four Gen5 PEG lanes for an M.2 slot.

If it's a chungus DTR notebook using a socketed desktop CPU that would make more sense. I guess arguably it's still 100% a laptop rather than a desktop, but from a technical discussion we're back to desktop parts again.

 

[Chris_Ramseyer]

The link below provides an example. They have different configurations with selectable CPUs, DRAM volumes, and GPUs.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/msi-raider-ge78-hx-17-240-hz-gaming-laptop-2560-x-1600-qhd--intel-14th-gen-core-i9-i9-14900hx-with-64gb-memory-black/6571735.p?skuId=6571735&utm_source=feed&ref=212&loc=GamingLaptops&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw3vO3BhCqARIsAEWblcA7V8QA_OXdwlHREpTIfR0QKxzVNBA6kZIhLM2HiGQLsBonSzOFkOUaAu_AEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

 

[Chrispy_]

The link below provides an example. They have different configurations with selectable CPUs, DRAM volumes, and GPUs.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/msi-raider-ge78-hx-17-240-hz-gaming-laptop-2560-x-1600-qhd--intel-14th-gen-core-i9-i9-14900hx-with-64gb-memory-black/6571735.p?skuId=6571735&utm_source=feed&ref=212&loc=GamingLaptops&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw3vO3BhCqARIsAEWblcA7V8QA_OXdwlHREpTIfR0QKxzVNBA6kZIhLM2HiGQLsBonSzOFkOUaAu_AEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Ah okay, Lunar lake is not the first PCIe 5.0 mobile chip!
I just looked up the 14900HX and it has 16 gen5 lanes, meaning that Intel has regressed for Lunar lake down to just 4 lanes :\

 

[bug]

Ah okay, Lunar lake is not the first PCIe 5.0 mobile chip!
I just looked up the 14900HX and it has 16 gen5 lanes, meaning that Intel has regressed for Lunar lake down to just 4 lanes :\

Lunar Lake is meant for ultraportables, it's not a replacement for HX SKUs.