Ultra-fast PCIe 4.0 storage is heading to handheld PCs, thanks to Phison's new 2230 SSD controller

pcgamer.com:

Handheld gaming PCs have quite specific needs, when it comes to storage. It needs to be very compact, with low power consumption, but offer fast transfers at the same time. SSD controller wizards Phison has launched three new chips at this year's CES event and one of them is the perfect match for SSDs designed for the Steam Deck and other portable PCs.

The most interesting controller announced is the PS5027-E27T. Where the other two are PCIe 5.0, this one uses the older 4.0 specification, but it's still good enough to offer sequential read/writes up to 7400 and 6700MB/s, respectively. The decision to scale the transfer rates back is to keep the power consumption (and therefore heat output) as low as possible, with L1.2 low power state being less than 5mW.

Although not exclusively targeted at this market, the E27T is an ideal SSD controller for handheld gaming PCs. The best M.2 2230 drives you can get for the likes of the Steam Deck typically use Phison's E21T chip, which has peak sustained read/write speeds of 5,000/4,500MB/s.

So, on those figures alone, the E27T is a substantial improvement. It also supports up to 8TB of 3D TLC and QLC flash memory, with the best performance achieved when using 2TB or more. But even the smallest configuration of 512GB will still be better than anything you can get for your portable PC right now.

Phison's other new models are the PS5031-E31T and PS5026-E26 'Max14um'. The former and the aforementioned E27T are so-called DRAM-less controllers. That means any SSDs built with these controllers won't have any DDR memory chips on the circuit board.

These are typically used to store an enormous map of what data is stored on the drive and where it is. DRAM-less storage drives have to use a