Posted on Friday, September 01 2017 @ 11:27 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Tom's Hardware
reports the first NVMe SSDs based on the Phison PS5008-E8 controller are expected to ship this month. Disks based on this controller will target the entry-level NVMe market, which is currently dominated by Intel's SSD 600p. The site heard vendors will offer 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB models.
The controller uses a PCIe 3.0 x2 interface for both M.2 and add-in card form factors. Phison took a chance with the two-lane interface to reduce system power consumption, which increases notebook battery life. Other emerging SSD processors in this space use four lanes to increase burst performance, but the low-cost products lack the processing power to sustain high performance levels. Phison designed the E8 controller to work with emerging 3D NAND technology.
The pricing of these Phison E8 based SSDs is expected to be less than the Intel 600p series, while the performance will be higher. Tom's Hardware got its hands on an early, unoptimized sample of the Phison E8 reference design and discovered it's faster in consumer workloads than the Intel SSD 600p and the WD Black PCIe.
