Phison demos a PCIe 5.0 SSD and it's shockingly fast

pcgamer.com:

As the launch of next generation platforms with PCIe 5.0 SSD support draws closer, Phison has showcased a PCIe 5.0 SSD in action. As expected, it's fast. The engineering sample drive is based on Phison’s new PS5026-E26 controller. The drive obliterates the sequential performance of PCIe 4.0 drives, with read and write speeds of 12,457MB/s and 10,047MB/s respectively.

Phison used CrystalDiskMark to benchmark the drive. While the sequential performance is what draws the headlines, its 4K performance is also excellent and will surely only get better. E26 drives are still months away from release, meaning there’s a lot of scope for firmware tweaks and improvements.

Phison says the E26 can reach up to 13,500MB/s and 12,000MB/s sequential read and write speeds. That isn’t too far from the maximum possible speed of a PCIe 5.0 x4 connection at 15,754MB/s.

The first E26 drives have already broken cover. At Computex last week, Apacer revealed its first PCIe 5.0 drives(opens in new tab). Both are rated at 13,000MB/s sequential read and 12,000MB/s sequential write speeds. Of course, we can expect the big players including Samsung, Western Digital and Seagate to reveal their PCIe 5.0 drives later in the year.

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An interesting thing to note is that some manufacturers may choose to adopt a new M.2 form factor. Whereas 2280 drives are by far the most common form factor used in