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It is no secret with SSD advance that performance and stability have been the driving force behind the wheel. Speed rules and if we can achieve that while maintaining data integrity and longevity in our storage device, we will keep pushing forward. Flash technology accounts for so much in our daily activities that it goes totally unnoticed. We have become a society of instant everything and SSDs remain to be the unsung hero all but a few may truly recognize.
I can remember sitting down with Michael Wu, Phisons President, at the 2014 Flash Memory Summit where the talk of the day was still SATA. Phison had decided to move forward with their newest PS5006 PCIe controller that would achieve speeds of 1.5GB/s read and 1.3GB/s write Trust me when I say those speeds were like lightning back then. I can still picture their display booth, David amongst the Goliaths. No more need be said as we introduce Phison’s newest PS5026-E26 Max14um PCIe 5.0 SSD sample which is already moving out to their partners at the worlds fastest speeds yet of 14GB/s.
A bit of a warning though… You are not going to be throwing this in your laptop anytime soon. The SSD requires (and we are fairly certain it will come with) an active cooling solution as you see here. This is also how you will see the drive available to the public soon enough with the SSD already situated in a ribbed aluminum casing with an integrated fan to keep temps right where they should be…and it works. We threw everything at this drive and its temps only hit a top temp of 53C as shown in our Crystal Disk Info result below. It does exactly what it should and remains within that elusive 11.55w power limitation of the PCI-SIG M.2 spec.
Our E26 reference sample is comprised of a black 2280 (22mm wide x 80 mm long) size PCB (printed circuit board) and is a PCIe 5.0 x4 (4-lane) solution that contains Phison’s PS5026-E26 8-channel NVMe SSD controller that is NVMe 2.0 compliant.. This is paired with a LPDDR4 DRAM chip along side 4 pieces of Micron’s best 232-layer B58R TLC NAND flash memory running at 2,400MT.
This is a two-sided SSD and contains two-pieces of Micron 512GB NAND on each side which provides the user with 1863GB of storage space when formatted. The drive also has built in thermal protection, AES 256-bit end-to-end data path protection, and has Phison 5th Gen LDPC ECC and RAID ECC for data reliability.
Listed specifications for the Phison E26 Max14um are 14GB/s read and 12GB/s write with up to 1500K read and 2000K write IOPS. Operating range is 0-70C with a storage range of -40 to 85C and there is no further information with respect to MTBF, warranty or pricing as this is simply a reference design supplied by Phison for our testing. This is not a retail sample.
I’m curious about how the active cooling might work. In the sample it looks like there’s a standard 4 pin connector similar to what would be used with a cpu or case fan. So that would mean that your motherboard would have to have an unused 4 pin socket available which the user would most likely set to run at 100% all of the time. Or maybe the eventual products would have a sata power to cooler adapter. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
Yes it is a simple 4-pin as one plugs into the motherboard and it does run at 100% all the time. It is actually very common and became such with SSDs around Gen 4. Great seeing you jump in Dave!
Nice to see that you’re back Les! Keep it up!
Thank you Gunnar!