PCIe Gen5 SSDs will hit the market in the coming months break all performance records in consumer customer stores. They will take advantage of the performance of the most advanced interface in the industry, PCI-Express 5.0, and will be equipped with the latest generation of NAND flash memory.

Another part of interest will be its controller, which is key to using the full potential of SSDs. Together with Silicon Motion, Phison is the world’s largest manufacturer of NAND flash controllers and sells them to many manufacturers in addition to the giants in the sector, Samsung or WD, who use their own controllers.

PCIe Gen5 SSD, amazing performance

Phison has developed the E26 controller specifically for this type of storage solution. They are designed to accelerate the next-generation NVMe SSD workload, including direct access technologies based on the Microsoft DirectStorage API. They will feature two ARM Cortex-R5 cores and three proprietary CoXProcessor 2.0 accelerators integrated on a chip using TSMC’s 12nm manufacturing processes.

The company has demonstrated the enormous performance of this platform on a technical sample compatible with Intel and AMD architectures. Phison used Micron’s 3D TCL NAND flash memory and ASUS X670 Crosshair Hero motherboard for the show.

Intel is expected to support these PCIe Gen5 SSDs (full performance) with the “Raptor Lake”, Core 13th Generation platform. As for AMD, it has confirmed full support with the new Ryzen 7000 processors, AM5 socket and 600 series chipsets, which were introduced last week at Computex 2022.

The level of performance can be seen in the following screenshot of a test performed with the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, where the sequential read / write speeds were higher than 12/10 GB per second. At random performance, the disk can provide up to 1.31 million 4K IOPS reads.

These are the highest values ​​a consumer SSD has ever achieved, up to 70% higher than current ones that use PCIe 4.0. It must be said that this development is an engineering sample and not a final product that other providers say will achieve even higher performance: 13/12 Gbytes per second in read / write.

The Phison E26 driver will be available in both consumer and commercial units. The company used the M.2 2580 format for test SSDs, but the final drives are expected to ship in the more standardized M.2 2280.