Supposedly, the ssd based on the PCIe 5.0 interface they should have been released last year, but they have been delayed. The reasons for the delay are the thermal problems they have and their high price. Well, Phison has launched the controller PS5031-E31T, which will reduce the price of these storage units.
These new PCIe 5.0-based SSDs offer read and write speeds of up to 14,000 MB/s. It’s twice the performance of PCIe 4.0-based drives and nearly five times the speeds of PCIe 3.0 SSDs.
A performance increase that has a big problem: temperature. Due to this increase in performance, the temperatures generated by these units grow exponentially. Something that forces you to use a heatsink, in many cases, with an integrated fan.
Price drop for new SSDs
Until now, Phison had on the market the controller PS5026-E26 for units of PCIe 5.0 high perfomance. This controller offers speeds of read up to 14,000 MB/s and write up to 11,800 MB/s. In addition, this controller is manufactured in the 12 nm process and two Cortex R5 cores, also supporting DRAM memory.
The new one controller PS5031-E31T has important limitations. Happens to have one read and write speed up to 10,800 MB/s. This controller is based on the 7nm process, has a single Cortex R5 core, and does not support DRAM.
Due to this improved manufacturing process and the reduction in cores, consumption and temperature are lowered. ok but does not solve the thermal problem background of PCIe 5.0 drives.
It integrates a system of LDPC ECC error correction seventh generation. This controller should support NVMe 2.0which is a significant leap from NVMe 1.4.
There are other cuts in this unit, such as not supporting independent cache memory and the communication channels go from 8 lines to 4 lines.
It has been specially designed for drives with an M.2 2280 form factor. This drive will offer medium for a total of 8TB, so we have another limitation.
What’s interesting is that we could see more 8TB drives than PCIe 4.0 based solutions. Nor many more, since it depends more on the manufacturers of memory units.
It doesn’t matter, they are still not interesting units
The performance leap of PCIe 3.0 SSDs over SATA is big. The difference in performance was very noticeable due to the limitations and lack of improvements of the SATA interface. The performance difference between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 is not as noticeable anymore.
If we talk about the jump to PCIe 5.0, this is further mitigated. There comes a time when video game loading times are no longer enough. As much as you improve the storage speed, you won’t notice it. Another different thing is in advanced workloads like photo and video editing.
PCIe 5.0 SSDs have more negatives than positives. We again face capacity limitations, set at 8TB. Possibly, the number of units with this capacity will be very small.
Without a doubt, the most bloody thing is having to put a heatsink with a fan to dissipate the heat. It shows how these storage units are quite meaningless. Also, that it is necessary to redesign the connection system, which should mutate to something similar to the DIMM socket of the RAM memory.
