Phison has put out new benchmarks for its E28 Gen5 SSD controller, offering much lower power than Silicon Motion, while also unveiling E31T drives and some superb demos.
Phison Compares Power Figures of Flagship E28 Gen5 Controller To Silicon Motion's SM2508, Showcases Superior Efficiency
Phison's E28 Gen5 SSD controller has been out for a while and is powering some of the fastest storage devices on the market right now. Its main competitor, the SMI2508 from Silicon Motion, is also being deployed in consumer-tier products, but a few years back, SMI claimed that they offered much lower power than the E28 controller, which Phison is now debunking.
The company showcases a Phison E28 Gen5 SSD against SMI's 2508-based solution in various benchmarks, with the E28 winning in every test.
In Sequential Sustained Read power consumption (Q8, T1), the Phison SSD operates at 6.17W versus 7.39W of the competition, while in Write tests, the E28 consumes 6.06W versus the 7.12W of the competition. This 1W difference may feel tiny, but it's something of a major consideration in SSDs.
Phison also shared Random Sustained Read/Write power consumption figures (Q32, T16) where the E28 Gen5 SSD consumed 7.46W versus the 7.9W of the competition, whereas in Write, the Gen5 E28 consumed 5.44W versus SMI's 5.91W. The SMI Gen5 controller also seems to run into spikes due to an unusual garbage collection kicking in much earlier. This pushes the power envelope to almost 8W.
The Phison E28-based Gen5 SSD solution is also showcased to offer some really high speeds of up to 14942.85 MB/s in Read, 14149.47 MB/s in Write, and 92.19/368.45 MB/s in Random 4K (Q1T1) benchmarks.
For the test demo, Phison used an AMD Gen5 platform, which offers some really fast storage performance. We asked Phison about some of the lackluster performance on Intel's Core Ultra 200S platform, and what they said was that the issue is due to the Gen5 lanes coming from a different section of the CPU that has higher latency versus the rest of the Gen5 lanes. Even 14th and 13th Gen CPUs offer faster Gen5 lanes without the latency issue, making them a better solution for Gen5 SSD consumers than Intel's Core Ultra 200S.
Moving onward, we have the Phison E31T "PS5031-E31T" M.2 SSD controller, which is a DRAM-less design. This solution can be adopted to 2230 and 2240 form factors, making them ideal for handhelds and laptops. We have been told that the 2230 Gen5 SSD solution will soon be incorporated into a next-gen handheld from a major vendor, so that is something to look forward to.
Another usecase for the Gen5 E31T SSD is in laptops, which offer much more battery life in the smaller 2230/2240 form factors vs the full 2280 solutions. This is ideal for OLED laptops, which have better screens but consume more power due to the brightness levels that OLED produces. With E31T-based SSDs, you not only get higher performance but also gain back battery timings.
Finally, we have an APEX storage benchmark, which was running 16 SSDs per APEX AIC. Three AICs were installed, of which two were running and produced up to 113,601 MB/s of Read and 104,628 MB/s of write speeds.
These numbers would've been even higher, but due to the current Windows kernel limitations, they aren't possible without extensive modifications, but this demo just goes off to show the incredible speeds that are possible with Phison's Gen5 SSD controllers and the respective products.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
