FMS: Phison with new SSD controller for PCIe 4.0
PCIe 4.0 is still interesting for mainstream SSDs. Phison brings a slight improvement to its DRAM-less E27T controller: the E29T.
The E29T from Phison is designed to accelerate mainstream SSDs.
7.4 GByte/s read, 6.8 GByte/s write, plus 1.2 million IOPS – if you've been following the news from FMS this week, you won't be impressed. But for a PCIe 4.0 SSD, these are good values that Phison promises with the E29T controller. Like all Phison models with a T at the end, it has no DRAM; it therefore uses the PC's main memory via the NVMe driver to manage the flash tables.
Compared to its predecessor, the E27T, the controller has only made a few improvements: It is 300 MByte/s faster when writing sequential data. More important, however, is a new version of the error correction method LDPC (Low Density Parity Check) as well as the improved support for QLC flash.
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Like all Phison controllers, the E29T is manufactured at TSMC in Taiwan, which is also due to the proximity: It could throw a stone across the road with the necessary data, said Chris Ramseyer, Director Technical Marketing at Phison, in an interview with heise online. It is not yet clear when SSDs with the new controller will be released.
U21 controller for USB4
The plans continue with the U21 controller, which converts USB4 natively to NAND flash. At the FMS, Phison showed a demo in which it fully utilized the USB4 interface: 4060 MByte/s for reading, 3640 MByte/s for writing. Phison also showed specially developed USB SSDs with this controller, which dock magnetically to smartphones, for example; with a very short USB cable, these should then also save the images when taking photos. The only thing missing is smartphones that can utilize this speed.
However, Phison itself will not be launching this SSD on the market: Although the company does not see itself as a pure controller manufacturer, it has never sold SSDs under its own name. Various other manufacturers have (at least some) PCIe SSDs manufactured by Phison, including Gigabyte, MSI and Sabrent. (ll)
