Phison To Unveil 14.7 GB/s PCIe 5.0 SSD and Cheap USB4 Drives at CES 2024

CES 2024 is a few weeks away, so Phison shared its plans for the consumer electronics industry's biggest trade show this week. Among the headliners of the event will be the company's latest PS5026-E26 Max14um platform for top-of-the-range PCIe Gen5 SSDs, as well as the PS2251-21 (U21) single-chip platform for USB4 drives that brings together great speeds and cost efficiency.

The company's PS5026-E26 Max14um platform, demonstrated back in August, relies on the PS5026-E26 controller with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface and I/O+ technology coupled with heavily tuned firmware to enable up to 14.7 GB/s sequential reads and up to 12 GB/s sequential writes with Micron's B58R 3D TLC NAND devices featuring a 2400 MT/s data transfer rate. Perhaps more importantly, drives based on the 'maximum' platform are projected to offer 1.5 million random read IOPS and 1.6 million random write IOPS, according to Phison's slide demonstrated at Flash Memory Summit.

One of the particularly interesting wrinkles of the PS5026-E26 Max14um PCIe Gen 5 SSD platform is that it needs decent cooling (just like other E26-based drives, to be honest), so to get to a 14.7 GB/s sequential read speed, Phison used Frore Systems's AitJet Mini cooling systems that use tiny vibrating MEMS membranes to generate airflows. We can only wonder whether Phison will recommend using these cooling devices for the PS5026-E26 Max14um-powered drives, but at least SSD suppliers have such an option.

Another product that Phison will demonstrate at CES is its Phison PS2251-21 (U21) single-chip solution suited for small portable storage devices 'in conventional and unconventional form factors' with a USB4 interface. The company says that these drives will offer performance of up to 4 GB/s, which is higher than what the best SSDs with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface provide. A single-chip solution like this could enable inexpensive, high-performance external USB4 drives and direct-attached storage devices, which are non-existent today.

In addition to the maxed-out PS5026-E26 Max14um platform and the PS2251-21 (U21) single-chip USB4 storage solution, Phison will again demonstrate its low-power PCIe Gen5 PS5031-E31T controller platform for low-cost DRAMless SSDs that features a quad-channel NAND architecture and promises a sequential read speed of up to 10.8GB/s and capacities up to 8 TB. Also, the company will showcase its low-power PS5027-E27T, a controller for M.2-2230 SSDs with a PCIe Gen4 interface, which will come in handy for devices like Asus ROG Ally or Valve's Steam Deck.