Packaging

We received just the drive without any retail packaging, which makes sense given the ES nature of this SSD.

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Phison SSD connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


A heatsink comes preinstalled; it's a large chunk of metal that can definitely soak up a lot of heat.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller and eight flash chips; two DRAM cache chips are installed, too.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5018-E18 is Phison's PCI-Express 4.0 controller with eight channels. It is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses five Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores. The E18 supports NVMe 1.4, TLC, DDR4 memory, and up to 32 dies.


The eight flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND B47R. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


Two Hynix DDR4-2666 chips provide 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.