Phison will deliver a 6,500 mb / s pcie 4.0 ssd controller in early 2020

Phison is leading the race when it comes to PCIe 4.0 storage, with its latest E16 controller driving the next generation of Corsair, Galax and Gigabyte SSDs, which can already deliver performance levels up to 5, 000MB / s.

Phison plans to launch a new controller that can offer speeds of up to 6, 500 MB / s

At the Gigabyte Aorus conference at Computex 2019, with images courtesy of Mixed Skills, we can see Phison President and CEO KS Pua confirm that "the best is yet to come."

PCIe 4.0 is here, but SSDs have yet to push the limits of the standard, which is above 5, 000 MB / s. The 5, 000 MB / s read speeds are impressive, but “by the first quarter of next year” Phison plans to launch a new controller that can offer speeds of up to 6, 500 MB / s. This is twice as fast as many of the world's leading PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 SSDs.

While the theoretical limit of PCIe 4.0 in a 4-track solution is around 8GB / s, the reality of the situation is that these speeds are impossible in the standard. There is a reason that there are no 4GB / s PCIe 3.0 4x SSDs or 2GB / s PCIe 3.0 2x SSDs. The same applies to PCIe 4.0.

Samsung's 970 Pro SSD is considered the world's fastest PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD and offers a maximum sequential read speed of 3, 500 MB / s. Giving this a 2x boost and a reasonable estimate of what we might expect from PCIe 4.0 devices is a maximum of 7GB / s of sequential reads, assuming that a powerful and fast enough controller like NAND can be produced.

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Phison's upcoming 6, 500 MB / s driver comes pretty close to this maximum speed estimate, which bodes well for what's to come in terms of data read and write speeds on our computers.

One factor to keep in mind is that Phison's commitment to release a 6, 500 MB / s controller by the first quarter of 2020 does not mean that we will see SSDs with that speed immediately, but that they will be launched over the course of the year. 2020.

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