XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite Takes PCIe 4 SSDs Mainstream With New SMI SM2267 Controller

by Brandon Hill — Tuesday, September 15, 2020, 10:29 AM EDT

With the launch of the AMD Ryzen 3000 processors and X570 chipset in July 2019, the PCIe 4.0 SSD era kicked off with a bang. We saw a number of PCIe 4.0 SSDs enter the market, all of which were using a Phison PS5016-E16 controller, including XPG with its GAMMIX S50.

Now, XPG is looking to flesh out the GAMMIX S50 family at the lower end of the pricing spectrum. Enter the GAMMIX S50 Lite, which still leverages the PCIe 4.0 interface, but uses the SMI SM2267 PCIe 4.0 controller instead of the Phison E16. As a result, the GAMMIX S50 is still able to offer respectable speeds, but its pricing will be more geared towards mainstream PC shoppers.

Where the standard GAMMIX S50 offers sequential read/write performance of 5,000MB/sec and 4,400MB/sec, the GAMMIX S50 Lite falls to just 3,900MB/sec and 3,200MB/sec respectively. Random read/write performance comes in at 490K IOPS and 540K IOPS respectively for the GAMMIX S50 Lite. This performance puts the SSD a fair distance ahead of the PCIe 3.0-based Samsung 970 Pro SSD with respect to sequential performance and roughly on par with random read/writes.

“With the launch of the S50 Lite, we have now extended our PCIe 4.0 SSD offering to meet not only the demands of early adopters but also mainstream users, whether for work or play,” said ADTA Product Marketing Director Ibsen Chen. “With support from our strategic partners at Silicon Motion, we have invested in developing a next-generation SSD that is accessible and offers exceptional performance.”

Unfortunately, there is no word on pricing at the moment for the GAMMIX S50 Lite, but we do know that it will be available in both 1TB and 2TB capacities once it launches. It will also be backed by XPG’s 5-year warranty. For reference, the standard GAMMIX S50 is priced at $179.99 for the 1TB version and at $359.99 for the 2TB version. We’d imagine that the GAMMIX S50 Lite will be priced well below these levels.

Tags: XPG, x570, pcie 4.0, gammix s50 lite

Brandon Hill

Brandon received his first PC, an IBM Aptiva 310, in 1994 and hasn’t looked back since. He cut his teeth on computer building/repair working at a mom and pop computer shop as a plucky teen in the mid 90s and went on to join AnandTech as the Senior News Editor in 1999. Brandon would later help to form DailyTech where he served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008 until 2014. Brandon is a tech geek at heart, and family members always know where to turn when they need free tech support. When he isn’t writing about the tech hardware or studying up on the latest in mobile gadgets, you’ll find him browsing forums that cater to his long-running passion: automobiles.

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