When games that rely on directstorage API come out, the speed increase of solid-state drives may eventually show up in the loading time. Before that, the advantage of high continuous transmission speed usually only occurs in the case of large video file transmission Phison has just shown a PCIe 5.0 SSD sample based on its self-developed ps5026-e26 controller and 1TB micron 3D TLC NAND
In the CrystalDiskMark, the continuous read speed of this solid-state drive is more than 12gb/s, and the continuous write speed is about 10gb/s. These figures are very impressive considering that the flagship PCIe 4.0 drives have a continuous transmission speed of up to about 7gb/s.
However, the 4K random reading performance of this model is limited to about 16000 IOPs, which can be said to be a more important indicator in daily use, while products such as the Samsung 980 Pro can reach 22000 IOPs. Of course, these figures may improve with more mature firmware in the shipped products.
Phison's ps5026-e26 is its first PCIe 5.0 controller. It has two arm cortex-r5 cores and three proprietary coxprocessor 2.0 accelerators. It is built on TSMC's 12NM process node, supports TLC and QLC NAND flash memory, and has a maximum data transmission speed of 2400mt/s.
It is worth mentioning that the engineering sample of Phison seems to use a slightly wider m.2 2580 overall dimension. Now most m.2 SSDs use 2280 (the first two digits indicate the width and the last two digits indicate the length). This extra width may make these new SSDs incompatible with the previous motherboards, although generally no one will pay for an advanced PCIe 5 SSD and use it in the form of limiting its performance on the old platform.
The E26 based SSD is expected to be launched later this year, when AMD's 600 series motherboard will also be available.