South Korean manufacturer FADU revealed its next-gen PCIe Gen6 SSD controller at FMS 2025, with up to 28.5 GB/s speeds.
Enterprise-Grade PCIe Gen6 SSDs Are On The Horizon As More Companies Reveal Their Next-Gen Controllers, FADU With 28.5 GB/s Speeds & Sub-9W Power
Last month, Silicon Motion became the first manufacturer to unveil a PCIe Gen6 SSD controller. The company titled it the SM8466 and is aimed at enterprise, with up to 28 GB/s speeds and 512 TB total capacity on a single storage device.
Now, South Korean manufacturer FADU, which is responsible for making several enterprise-grade SSD controllers, has unveiled its own PCIe Gen6 SSD controller, the Sierra FC6161. FADU announced that it partnered with Meta, which will be leveraging their next-gen AI SSD technology to power its datacenter and enterprise solutions.
So, coming to the specs, the FADU Sierra FC6161 PCIe Gen6 SSD controller will offer read and write speeds of up to 28.5 GB/s. That's 500 MB/s more than the Silicon Motion controller. The controller is going to enable up to 512 GB capacities per storage solution, and the Random Read & Write speeds are rated at 6.9 Million IOPS and 1 Million IOPS (based on 7% OP), respectively.
- Capacity: Up to 512TB
- Read and write speed: 28.5GB per second
- Random read: 6.9 million IOPS
- Random write: 1 million IOPS (based on 7% OP)
- Power consumption: less than 9W, combining high performance with low energy consumption
Interestingly, FADU also shares some power metrics and claims that their Gen6 SSD controller will operate at a sub-9W TDP. We know from our own testing that the fastest consumer-tier Gen5 SSDs, such as the ones based on Phison's E28 controller, consume around 7-7.5W at peak load, while enterprise-grade SSDs like Samsung's PM1743 can hit over 20W at peak load.
So it looks like there might be some nice power savings involved with next-gen PCIe Gen6 controller-based SSDs, but we have to take it with a grain of salt since early reports did state that while performance will go up, so will the power draw and heat output.
Many companies have already gone with beefy heat-sinks, some even going with active air/liquid cooled solutions, on consumer-grade SSDs. With that said, don't expect to see any PCIe Gen6 SSD in the consumer market, at least till 2030, as Gen5 is yet to go full mainstream.
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