Phison E28 Preview: Here’s The Future Of Low Power Speedy Gen 5 SSDs
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Phison E28 SSD Controller - MSRP TBD |
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Retail drives based on the Phison E28 aren’t ready for prime time just yet, but we’ve got a reference SSD on hand to give you a sneak peek of what it can do. Like the E26, a myriad of Phison’s partners plan to bring E28-based drives to market, but it’s going to be a couple of months before that happens. For now, today’s teaser will hopefully whet your appetite...
Phison E28 Reference Specifications And Features
As mentioned, The Phison E28 SSD was designed for use in desktops, notebooks, and game consoles. The controller is built using a 6nm lithography process (the E26 was manufactured at 12nm), which allowed Phison to tune the drive for both performance and power efficiency.
Like the E26 that came before it, the Phison E28 is a 3-core design, featuring two proprietary Phison CoX-processors, but the more advanced manufacturing node results in a smaller die that requires less voltage to operate at peak performance. The controller is paired with some DRAM cache and up to two BGA308 flash packages, at transfer rates up to 2,400MT/s.
The reference drive you see pictured here is equipped with 2TB of “BiCS8”, which is 8th generation BiCS 3D TLC flash memory.
To enhance performance and density, BiCS8 features 218 layers and leverages CMOS directly Bonded to Array (CBA) and OPS, or On Pitch Select Gate Drain, technologies.
On the Phison E28 reference drive we tested, PCIe power and signaling circuitry reside on the top of the PCB, closest to the gold fingers on the card edge, followed (from right to left) by the PS5028-E28 controller itself, a single piece of DRAM and finally a pair of NAND flash memories, totally 2TB of capacity. The bottom of the PCB is home to a couple of test points, but those likely won’t be present on retail-ready drives.
And now that you’ve seen what the drive looks like and have some info regarding the E28 controller, let’s get this bad-boy plugged in and see how it performs.
Phison E28 SSD Benchmark Preview
Under each test condition, the SSDs featured here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Our testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and Windows 11 was fully updated as well. Windows Firewall, automatic updates, and screen savers were all disabled before testing, and Focus Assist was enabled to prevent any interruptions.
In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test. All of the drives here have also been updated to their latest firmware as of press time. Where applicable, we would also typically use any proprietary NVMe drivers available from a given manufacturer. When not available, the drives used the in-box Microsoft NVMe driver included with Windows 11 (all of the drives tested in this article used the in-box Windows driver).HotHardware's Test System:
| Processor: Intel Core i9-14900K Motherboard: MSI Z790 Godlike Video Card: Intel iGPU Memory: 32GB Micron DDR5-6000 Storage: Samsung SSD 990 Pro (2TB) (OS Drive) ADATA Legend 970 Pro (2TB) Samsung SSD 9100 Pro (4TB) - Full Power Mode MSI Spatium M580 Frozr(2TB) Crucial T705 (2TB) Micron 4600 (2TB) Phison E28 Reference Drive (2TB) |
OS: Windows 11 Pro x64 Chipset Drivers: Intel v10.1.19284 Benchmarks: IOMeter 1.1 HD Tune v6.1 ATTO v4.01.01f Blackmagic Disk Speed Test SiSoftware SANDRA CrystalDiskMark v8.0.6 x64 Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail PCMark 10 Storage Bench 3DMark Storage Tests |
IOMeter Benchmarks
IOMeter is a well-respected industry standard benchmark. However, despite our results with IOMeter scaling as expected, it is debatable as to whether or not certain access patterns actually provide a valid example of real-world performance. The access patterns we tested may not reflect your particular workloads, for example, or mirror the behavior of actual applications. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative throughput, latency, and bandwidth with a given storage solution. In addition, there are certain highly-strenuous workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools. In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; a custom Workstation access pattern, with an 8K transfer size, consisting of 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (33% writes) and 100% random access. Queue depths from 1 to 16 were tested...
Latency was also a strong point with the Phison E28 SSD. At the lowest queue depths -- which are most important for consumer systems -- the Phison E28 SSD offered some of the lowest latency of the bunch.
SiSoft SANDRA 2023
ATTO Disk Benchmark
ATTO is another "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5KB through 64MB transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.
The Phison E28 SSD put up strong sequential reads and writes in the ATTO Disk Benchmark. Write throughout was right there in the mix with some of the fastest drives currently available. Read throughput was also very good and led the pack with transfer sizes ranging from about 32K - 1MB. But even where it didn't lead, the Phison E28 SSD was among the fastest of the group anyway.
Read and write IO throughput was a mixed bag. The Phison E28 SSD was competitive with the other drives throughout most of the testing, but laned near the bottom with the smallest transfer sizes in the read test.
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test Benchmark
Next up we the DIsk Speed Test from Blackmagic Design. The Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is a simple tool to quickly measure and certify disk performance for working with high quality video files. The benchmark can be configured with various file sizes, from 1GB to 5GB. We tested with the largest 5GB file size and allowed the benchmark to loop for 3 minutes before recording the results.
