Phison Shows Off 6nm E28 NVMe Gen 5 Controller; E31T with Micron G9, and a Massive Enterprise SSD

[btarunr]

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.



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[TheLostSwede]

8.5 W, is that average or peak? If it's average, the SM2508 is still running cooler at 5 W, but it peaks at 9.1 W.

 

[GabrielLP14]

@btarunr by any chance could you send me the picture of the Phison E28 controller without the TPU watermark? so i can add it to the database

 

[Daven]

A M.2 SSD with 32 TB and 14.5 GB/s reads/writes would be so phenomenal and worth the wait for the price to reach consumer levels.

 

[phubar]

A M.2 SSD with 32 TB and 14.5 GB/s reads/writes would be so phenomenal and worth the wait for the price to reach consumer levels.

I'm sorry but at 32TB this thing won't reach common consumer pricing levels (ie. ~$150-300) until its been loooooooong obsolete on ebay by shady Chinese sellers years from now.

For bulk storage mechanical hard drives are still pretty good for the price.

There are some rumors that the next big price drop in high capacity SSD's won't happen until PLC (Penta Level Cell) flash is ready for mass production. PLC is probably going to be significantly slower, hotter, and have much less R/W cycle life than even QLC flash (which is already fairly slow, hot, and not so great R/W cycle life) but if you want bulk capacity SSD's for consumer prices that is what will be necessary.

They'll probably target server and enterprise use first and then release cheaper client PLC drives in mid to late 2026 is what I would guess.

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

A M.2 SSD with 32 TB and 14.5 GB/s reads/writes would be so phenomenal and worth the wait for the price to reach consumer levels.

You're going to be waiting well over half a decade probably. These capacities have been around in enterprise for a while with enterprise costs. You can put enterprise products into a consumer PC (it's not more silly than putting a 5090 in) but you pay the cost for it.

I've got U.2 drives in my PC they are great!

 

[TheLostSwede]

@btarunr by any chance could you send me the picture of the Phison E28 controller without the TPU watermark? so i can add it to the database

I'll sort that out for you.

 

[GabrielLP14]

I'll sort that out for you.

Thanks buddy