MSI and Phison Partner to Launch Spatium E26 PCIe Gen5 AIC SSD

[btarunr]

Phison is on a mission to be the first to market with PCIe Gen 5 SSD controllers, having announced the E26-series controllers this CES. The company is ready with a branded drive under the MSI Spatium brand, the MSI Spatium E26. Built in the PCIe add-in-card (AIC) form-factor, the drive features a PCI-Express 5.0 x4 interface (128 Gbps per direction), and very likely sticks to the reference design that Phison demoed in its own booth.

This PCB is used in its client configuration, with just the controller, DRAM, and NAND flash chips; while the PCB allows an enterprise configuration with banks of capacitors offering explicit power-loss protection (the NAND flash chips offer implicit PLP). A simple copper-film heatspreader is used. Neither MSI nor Phison put out actual performance numbers, but mentioned sequential reads being "10 GB/s or beyond" (the interface is physically capable of 16 GB/s).



Update Jan 17th: MSI clarified that this is not yet a shipping product, but a representation of what such a device could be. Thus, this should be considered a concept or at best proof of concept. Both MSI and Phison are actively working together on exploring what such a retail product could be.

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[InVasMani]

I thought the controller was like the hottest part of a NVME drive like the one part of the card that isn't cooled.

 

[MachineLearning]

I thought the controller was like the hottest part of a NVME drive like the one part of the card that isn't cooled.

Don't worry, the NAND [which produces less heat and, when writing, prefers to be slightly warm] will be nice and chilly!

Anyway, they did say this was a concept product rather than a commercially available thing. Maybe the E26 has insanely good thermal management to where it can handle 10GB/s without a heatsink or throttling, but I doubt that. I assume they'll just give it a full-cover aluminum heatsink when they iron it out for retail and call it a day.

 

[Patriot]

Don't worry, the NAND [which produces less heat and, when writing, prefers to be slightly warm] will be nice and chilly!

Anyway, they did say this was a concept product rather than a commercially available thing. Maybe the E26 has insanely good thermal management to where it can handle 10GB/s without a heatsink or throttling, but I doubt that. I assume they'll just give it a full-cover aluminum heatsink when they iron it out for retail and call it a day.

I mean, for product demo they also stuck it on an itx board... which would have to then be an APU build.