The first economical high-end SSD: Biwin X570 Pro with Silicon Motion SM2508
The days of huge SSD cooling towers are over: The SM2508 controller from Silicon Motion requires little power and still delivers high performance.
(Image: c't)
Silicon Motion has now completed its SSD controller for PCIe 5.0, the SM2508. The first SSD equipped with it that reached us is the X570 Pro from the Chinese company Biwin. It has 2 TB of storage space and 2 GB of DRAM cache. The manufacturer of the 232-layer NAND flash Micron. Silicon Motion is shaking up the market with the SM2508.
So far, controller manufacturer Phison has dominated the PCI Express 5.0 SSD market with its E26. Not only did it bring the first controller for these fast SSDs onto the market and was without competition for a long time, the Taiwanese also produce many of the fast SSDs for companies such as Corsair, MSI, Sabrent and Seagate. The biggest problem with the E26 is its electrical power consumption: We have already seen peak values of more than 13 watts in individual measurements. This is not only significantly higher than the 11.55 watts that an M.2 slot is actually allowed to transmit, but also leads to huge heat sinks and designs with one or even two fans to dissipate the hot air from the controller.
Innogrit's beacon of hope, the IG5666 5.0 SSD controller, was certainly able to take a few market shares away from the E26, but in terms of power consumption, the controller went one better. The first IG5666 SSD, the Adata Legend 970 Pro, also failed to achieve the speed of the E26 models in initial tests.
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Initial measurements are positive
In terms of speed, the X570 Pro outperforms almost all E26 SSDs, at least for sequential transfers: just under 14.4 GByte/s for reading compared to 13.25 GByte/s for writing. When accessing random addresses, the SSD is not quite as good with 1.4 and 1 million IOPS respectively; in this discipline, the Crucial T705 achieves almost 1.4 and 1.5 million IOPS respectively.
Above all, however, the X570 Pro manages with significantly less power, as promised. Even the idle power of 1.5 watts is only half that of the E26 SSD Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 14000. The difference in operation is even greater: The X570 Pro requires just under 8 watts when writing and reading, while the Gigabyte SSD consumes around 10 watts.
You will find further measured values in an upcoming SSD test in c't. This will also include the new Samsung SSD 9100 Pro, which promises roughly the same speed with equally low-energy consumption, as well as other SSDs from Biwin, Gigabyte, Orico, PNY and Western Digital.
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