The Drive

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


PCI-Express 5.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 4.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and two flash chips, a DRAM cache chip is not included.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison E31 is the company's second PCI-Express 5.0 controller. It supports a four-lane configuration and four flash channels, it's a cost-optimized DRAM-less design. The controller is produced using a 7 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.


The two flash chips are Toshiba 218-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 GB.