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Up real early this morning to write about the Phison E18 NVMe SSD Controller as there have been more than a few readers that have reminded us more than a few times that the E18 is coming over the past few months. Well the Phison E18 hit key reviewers hands yesterday and trust me when I say it is gaining much attention. It will set the bar in Gen 4 SSD performance much sooner than later. We might guess that you might want to watch Sabrent releases in the next few months as this SSD just might be seen in capacities to 8TB.
The exciting thing about this particular SSD is that it will be the first to reach performance benchmarks of both 7GB/s read and write and quite possibly, also hitting 1 million IOPS right along with that. The PS5018-E18 controller is 8-channel, max 32CE, NVMe 1.4 and built on the TSMC 12nm manufacturing process with 5 cores – 3x Arm Cortex R5 with two Phison Proprietary IP CoCProcessors.
The Phison E18 will reach speeds of 7.4GB/s read and 7GB/s write with 1 million IOPS, remembering of course that this early sample was sent to a few reviewers as a heads up that things are moving fast. Built on the 4th Gen LDPC engine, the E18 has End-to-End Data Path Protection, SmartECC, AES 128/256-Bit hardware encryption with Crypto Erase support, TCG, OPAL 2.0 and Pyrite accreditations.
On our sample SSD, we have the Phison PS5018-E18 8-channel NVMe Gen 4 controller, SKHynix DRAM buffers on either side, along with eight pieces of Micron B27B TLC NAND flash memory running at 1200 MT/s bus speed.
As we have stated, this is an early sample and the newer Micron B47R TLC memory as rather hard to come by but you can expect to see this in manufacturers products running at 1600 MT/s soon enough. This is what you will see with B47R memory as first posted by Tweaktown here.
The great thing about this announcement is that, well between Phison and Sabrent, we are sure that we will be seeing this controller come to market on high capacity SSDs soon enough. Phison even has a pretty decent marketing video just posted…
Now let’s get to the meat and gravy of this report.
This is already amazing; however I am very eager to see you get the finished product with the newer Micron B47R TLC memory and the latest firmware for testing.
Have you noticed much difference heat-wise between the E18 and E16 SSDs?
Operating temperature for this SSD is low 20s and it is much cooler than the previous Gen 4 SSDs we have been seeing, top temp reached being 70C.
how long until controllers for nvme storage get integrated right on the cpu, like they do with RAM? 🙂
Is the latency comparable to Intel 905P?
How does the Random Read compare in your opinion.
Always enjoy your reviews.
Still have my XP941 in one of my 1U’s making me dough.
Cheerz