No more fans: Phison's new PCIe Gen 5 controller sacrifices raw SSD speed in the name of silence
It would be fair to say that PCIe Gen 5.0 SSDs have had a difficult start in life. While Gen 4 drives have become something of a standard in many high-end systems, Gen 5 drives have failed to take off in similar fashion, primarily because for most users the previous generation SSDs bring great real world performance for a much more reasonable price. Beyond the high pricing and limited usefulness for this sort of speed as things currently stand, there's still another rather large elephant in the room: Heat.
However, Phison has announced several new products it'll show off at its CES 2024 booth (via Tom's Hardware), and one controller in particular seems designed to address those pesky thermals.
The snappily titled PS5031-E31T is an M.2 PCIe Gen 5 controller with a maximum sequential read and write speed support of up to 10,800 MB/s. This would put it on the slower end of the scale compared to other PCIe Gen 5 drives, but still a fair bit faster than the theoretical maximum of the PCIe 4.0 x4 speed limit of 7,880 MB/s.
However, because it's designed to operate at lower power and therefore produces less heat, the hope is that it should enable Gen 5 drives to be manufactured without the need for an active SSD cooler. This would open up the technology to be used in compact systems, laptops and handheld devices that don't have the physical space for bulky heat-dissipation methods.
The new controller is built on TSMC's 7nm process, with a 4-channel configuration, ARM Coretex R5 CPU, AES 256 encryption, and Phison's 7th Gen LDPC. It'll support a maximum capacity up to 8TB and both 3D TLC and QLC NAND flash.
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