Chinese Company UNIS Develops M.2 Gen 5 DRAMless SSD with 14.9 GB/s Max Sequential Speeds

[btarunr]

Chinese PC hardware company UNIS, a subsidiary of the Tsinghua Unigroup, unveiled a potentially disruptive new consumer M.2 Gen 5 NVMe SSD that could undercut the fastest Gen 5 drives in its form-factor. The new UNIS S5 is built in the M.2-2280 form factor, with a PCI-Express 5.0 x4 host interface. The company claims a maximum sequential read speed of 14.9 GB/s, which is higher than that of the current M.2 Gen 5 NVMe client-segment SSDs. Here's how the drive could undercut its Western contemporaries—it's DRAMless.

The drive features a first-party SSD controller designed by UNIS, which relies on HMB (host memory buffer) technology. Besides its 14.9 GB/s max read speeds, the drive offers a maximum sequential write speed of 12.9 GB/s—also among the highest in the industry—and 4K random access performance of up to 1.8 million IOPS reads, with up to 1.7 million IOPS writes. The performance claims make the UNIS S5 significantly faster than any DRAMless Gen 5 SSD, with the fastest such drives offering around 12 GB/s sequential transfer speeds; and faster than drives based on a DRAM-cached controller platform. For instance, the recently launched Samsung 9100 PRO offers up to 14.8 GB/s sequential reads, but at higher sequential write speeds of up to 13.4 GB/s. Pictured below is the UNIS S5 Ultra, the company's flagship drive based on a proprietary DRAM-cached controller.



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[dont whant to set it"']

That's great and all .
Serial read is well and good, as did so other manufacturers. But how/what about parallel I/O.
The "ghost" of Optane might be lurking, not the cheapy Optane (does work ok considering it's limits). It gotta have been a Micron brain child under Intel marketing, what a shame of potential.

 

[mechtech]

Don't know about anyone else, but I would be more happy with pcie gen4 but more 4TB and larger drives for reasonable prices............reasonable being less money than two of the same 2TB drives since 1 less controller, PCB, box, ram chip, etc.

 

[Veseleil]

The more players in the field, the better. Still, SSD prices are fairly high, even the gen 3 ones. 4TB for >$200...

 

[pigulici]

'could'...'would'...wake me up when it is...also I wouldn't trust an chinese company, until I see some 3rd's party tests...

 

[Easo]

'could'...'would'...wake me up when it is...also I wouldn't trust an chinese company, until I see some 3rd's party tests...

You almost guaranteed wrote this comment from a device with components made by Chinese companies. So...

 

[L0stS0ul]

Honestly, I don't need faster SSD but "cheap" 8TB drives where the price from 1TB decreases with the increase of capacity for each TB. The prices of 4TB and higher drives are a bad joke and nothing has changed for a long time.

 

[pigulici]

You almost guaranteed wrote this comment from a device with components made by Chinese companies. So...

It is a difference between 'made in china under western supervision' and 'made in china under china supervision'( see Apple vs Huawei at smartphones), I see from your comments that you are quite 'friendly' with ccp, good for you, this don't change the fact that more and more news about things/products 'announced' by chinese companies(under the chinese supervision) are on this website, products that we will have it in near future, and will be better than hot water or invention of the wheel, this mean that the chinese propaganda works well. I lived under communism, for many years, and this propaganda get me too, at the beginning . For sure, for us, as consumers, it is better when it is competition between companies, now some companies do it more dirty than others, but in china case, unfortunately for us, the bigh companies are not so afraid of them anymore, you know, to much broken promises, and too little great results. If you wan I can pm some links to some youtube channels that show the real china(or at least very close to real).

As about those speeds, even if will be real, in real life, I will better have a bigger ssd gen4 than a smaller and faster gen5

 

[ymdhis]

Speed isn't really any relevant now. I'd rather have them reach price parity with HDDs.

 

[windwhirl]

Don't know about anyone else, but I would be more happy with pcie gen4 but more 4TB and larger drives for reasonable prices............reasonable being less money than two of the same 2TB drives since 1 less controller, PCB, box, ram chip, etc.

I don't give two flying pigs about PCIE Gen4 SSDs. Gen3 is enough for me. I just want the $/GB ratio to improve a whole lot.

 

[dinmaster]

I'd like to see ssd's 20tb like the hdd's using sata or a new standard interface, pcie (usb 3.2/4). everyone jokes about pcie6/7 but if the computer has 40 lanes of pcie 7, could down it to pcie 5. 1xpcie7 would be 4xpcie5, you could have many peripherals running at lower speeds instead of 6/7 speeds, even 5 speeds today are overkill for most things but as you can see it has advantages of being available. you could have more usable lanes at lower pcie speeds. 6 x usb4 connected drives or just sata like pcie connectors and cables, replace sata completely.

 

[LabRat 891]

Guessing, they're using an 8-channel gen5 NAND controller, and aggressively utilizing pSLC mode caching across all NAND?

 

[Athena]

would like to see actual numbers on sustained transfer rates

for all we know, these could be super slow once the cache is used up

 

[Verpal]

That's great and all .
Serial read is well and good, as did so other manufacturers. But how/what about parallel I/O.
The "ghost" of Optane might be lurking, not the cheapy Optane (does work ok considering it's limits). It gotta have been a Micron brain child under Intel marketing, what a shame of potential.

I am going to hold onto my Optane stick to the end of time at this point.... even comparing to current pcie 5.0 ssd, it is still substantially faster in loading games. It might be a stick of ''cheapy'' consumer optane, but this ancient stick still work better than current SSD, which is a shame.

 

[_roman_]

DRAM-less = needs special hardware and software requirements. Slows down computer by extra traffic. Other drives do not have this flaw

I would correct the headline. This time it's heavy clickbait = ... the drive offers a maximum sequential write speed of 12.9 GB/s = up to 12.9 GB/s write speed

i would be happy when we could have for any given task always minimum full pcie 4.0 x 4 speeds. Regardless of write / read / random and such.
up to nonsense speeds with fancy pcie 5.0 marketing with no real results for any given scenario - any = worst case scenario + HMB feature disabled

 

[95Viper]

Let's stick to the topic.

 

[AsRock]

I find it funny, like come one. They say samsungs upto, and the say their max and skip the part that their is up to as well.

The whole thing stinks and hope people will wait until trusted reviews are out.

 

[LabRat 891]

I find it funny, like come one. They say samsungs upto, and the say their max and skip the part that their is up to as well.

The whole thing stinks and hope people will wait until trusted reviews are out.

Personally, I want to know technical details.
What controller? What NAND? What layout?
edit:
-In-house controller, or modified/rebranded/cloned existing budget Gen5 controller.
-YMTC TLC 3D NAND. YMTC being a subsidiary company.
-8-channel, single-sided. Probably.

The lack of that information, even when trying to dig a little further, is concerning.


These 'budget' Gen5 drives interest me greatly for use in bandwidth-constrained and legacy applications.
Ideally, the controller and NAND should be more than fast enough to sustain performance within the bottlenecked link's limitations.

 

[b1k3rdude]

yeah ok, but lets see the endurance. Pound to a pinch of sh*t the sequencials fall off a cliff rather quickly..

 

[MaMoo]

It is a difference between 'made in china under western supervision' and 'made in china under china supervision'( see Apple vs Huawei at smartphones), I see from your comments that you are quite 'friendly' with ccp, good for you, this don't change the fact that more and more news about things/products 'announced' by chinese companies(under the chinese supervision) are on this website, products that we will have it in near future, and will be better than hot water or invention of the wheel, this mean that the chinese propaganda works well. I lived under communism, for many years, and this propaganda get me too, at the beginning . For sure, for us, as consumers, it is better when it is competition between companies, now some companies do it more dirty than others, but in china case, unfortunately for us, the bigh companies are not so afraid of them anymore, you know, to much broken promises, and too little great results. If you wan I can pm some links to some youtube channels that show the real china(or at least very close to real).

As about those speeds, even if will be real, in real life, I will better have a bigger ssd gen4 than a smaller and faster gen5

Yup. At work, we banned all sorts of Chinese devices from both physical presence and network presence. This includes Huawei and is a pretty big list.

yeah ok, but lets see the endurance. Pound to a pinch of sh*t the sequencials fall off a cliff rather quickly..

It is not even the major components that could have their corners cut. Little things like capacitors could be swapped from 10000 hour parts to 5000. Resistors could be swapped from 5% tolerance to 10%. None of these things are easily detectable but will shorten the lifespan of the device. We used to manufacture parts in China and we had to take some training on how to QC Chinese electronics and these were the types of subtle things we had to look out for. Literally inspection one month and swapped parts the next week.

 

[blinnbanir]

There are Chinese drives on Amazon and Newegg. Ediloca is an example. They claim 7000 mb/s sequential. Crystal Disk Mark will confirm it. Then you get the other. Like the drive has the exact same temp in HWinfo no matter what it is doing. All of the other drives properly report temp rising as they are working. These came after the PS5 got its update too so you know. If you want to see the truth though run ATTO you will see the truth. It still gives me 8 TB RAID 0 for $500 Canadian. I am only storing Games as more sensitive Data is better served on a flash drive these days of 24/7 connectivity.

 

[Dr. Dro]

It is a difference between 'made in china under western supervision' and 'made in china under china supervision'( see Apple vs Huawei at smartphones), I see from your comments that you are quite 'friendly' with ccp, good for you, this don't change the fact that more and more news about things/products 'announced' by chinese companies(under the chinese supervision) are on this website, products that we will have it in near future, and will be better than hot water or invention of the wheel, this mean that the chinese propaganda works well. I lived under communism, for many years, and this propaganda get me too, at the beginning . For sure, for us, as consumers, it is better when it is competition between companies, now some companies do it more dirty than others, but in china case, unfortunately for us, the bigh companies are not so afraid of them anymore, you know, to much broken promises, and too little great results. If you wan I can pm some links to some youtube channels that show the real china(or at least very close to real).

As about those speeds, even if will be real, in real life, I will better have a bigger ssd gen4 than a smaller and faster gen5

Many high performance and/or reliability SSDs use flash from YMTC and homegrown controllers from other Chinese companies, this is fact. Yangtze Memory has manufactured a pretty good 232-layer 3D NAND chip for a good while now. Many brands of renown use their products, from both within and outside China. Kingston uses YMTC memory in some of their SSDs, for example.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Honestly, I don't need faster SSD but "cheap" 8TB drives where the price from 1TB decreases with the increase of capacity for each TB. The prices of 4TB and higher drives are a bad joke and nothing has changed for a long time.

Agreed. I'm still looking for a cheap but good 8TB SATA drives, but NOT Samsung trash, such as their QVO's or simmilar garbage.

 

[W3RN3R]

Yeah sure It'll work great for a while.... Until it doesn't.

 

[Onasi]

As about those speeds, even if will be real, in real life, I will better have a bigger ssd gen4 than a smaller and faster gen5

Being fair, in real life there are vanishingly small differences even between Gen 3 and Gen 5 drives. I would say that for 90+% of users the added heat and power consumption from the Gen 5 drives just doesn’t make sense.

That's great and all .
Serial read is well and good, as did so other manufacturers. But how/what about parallel I/O.
The "ghost" of Optane might be lurking, not the cheapy Optane (does work ok considering it's limits). It gotta have been a Micron brain child under Intel marketing, what a shame of potential.

And yeah, this is another reason. What you actually feel as “snappiness” from SSDs in daily use is from random performance. And conventional NAND just isn’t showing any significant improvements in that regard at all. Even SATA drives are still, by and large, more than fine for normal usage. The SSD market, in terms of consumer products, is just spinning its wheels trying to wow people with “big namba gud” marketing that isn’t actually relevant to many people’s PC use.