Phison E31T Preview: PCIe Gen 5 SSDs Finally Go Mainstream
Phison E31T SSD Preview: PCIe 5 Solid State Drives Get More Affordable With Lower Power And Snappy Performance
| Phison E31T PCIe Gen 5 SSD: $TDB The new Phison E31T will power a new wave of affordable and efficient mainstream PCIe Gen 5 Solid State Drives, with solid performance, low power consumption and lower pricing, designed for desktop and mobile systems.
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Phison E31T SSD Platform Specifications And Features
Find Phison-Based PCIe 5 SSDs @ Amazon
As you can see in the spec table above, the Phison E31T will be offered in 1TB and 2TB capacities, and will be capable of up to 10.3GB/s reads, with either 8.3GB/s or 8.6GB/s writes, depending on the capacity, with random read and write IOPS of up to 1.3M and 1.5M, respectively. Endurance is rated for 600TBW on the 1TB model and 1,200TBW on the 2TB model. And Phison also tells us the E31T is capable of putting up over 7GB/s in notebooks that offer only PCIe Gen5x2 M.2 slots, with the added benefit that the drives consume up to 34% lower power than Gen4x4 drives that offer similar performance (7GB/s).
The Phison E31T is a native PCIe Gen 5 controller, with 4 lanes of PCIe connectivity, that’s manufactured on TSMC’s 7nm process node. Paired to the controller are a couple of pieces of Kioxia BiCS8 3D TLC NAND, operating at 3,600MT/s. The combination of TSMC’s 7nm manufacturing process, the lack of DRAM (Phison E31T-based drives will be DRAM-less HMB devices), the E31T’s updated architecture, and Kioxia BiCS8 3D TLC NAND, results is a relatively low-power drive that’ll be right at home in notebooks and laptops. The PS4 power state is only 3.5mW and the drives peak at only 6.1W. Average power is 5.9W, however.
Due to its relatively low-power operation, the Phison E31T does not require a heatsink, but one is recommended for extended workloads, as the case with virtually all modern SSDs.
The drive itself is about as simple, and clean as can be. The controler and a couple of pieces of NAND are mounted on the top of the PCB, along with a handul of surface mounted compoments, and the backside of the PCB is completely bare. The form-factor pictued here is a common 2280 gumstick, but we suspect smaller drives based on the E31T will arrive at some point in the future as well.
To see where the Phison’s E31T falls relative to other drives on the market, we compared its performance to a varied mix of PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 drives, including a couple based on Phison’s higher-end E26 Gen 5 controller. Take a look...
Phison E31T PCIe Gen 5 SSD Benchmarks
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.HotHardware's Test System:
| Processor: Intel Core i9-14900K Motherboard: MSI Z790 Godlike Video Card: GeForce RTX 3080 Memory: 32GB Micron DDR5-6000 Storage: ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade (OS Drive) ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 (2TB) Seagate FireCuda 540 (2TB) Samsung SSD 990 Pro (2TB) MSI Spatium M570 Pro (2TB) Kingston Fury Renegade (1TB) Phison E31T Reference Drive (2TB) |
OS: Windows 11 Pro x64 Chipset Drivers: Intel v10.1.19284 Benchmarks: IOMeter 1.1 HD Tune v5.75 ATTO v4.01.01f AS SSD SiSoftware SANDRA CrystalDiskMark v8.0.4c x64 Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker 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 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 somewhat higher on the Phison E31T-based drive according to IOMeter, but was still within striking distance of the higher-end drives we tested.
SiSoft SANDRA 2022
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.
Once it got rolling at about the 64K transfer size, the Phison E31T was able to stretch its legs and land in second place overall, behind only the higher-end Phison-based MSI Spatium M570 Pro.
Read and write IO throughput was a mixed bag. The Phison E31T was competitive with the other drives throughout, but laned about in the middle of the pack in the write test. However, it typically trailed in the read test.
AS SSD Compression Benchmark
Next up we ran the Compression Benchmark built-into AS SSD, an SSD specific benchmark being developed by Alex Intelligent Software. This test is interesting because it uses a mix of compressible and non-compressible data and outputs both Read and Write throughput of the drive. We only graphed a small fraction of the data (1% compressible, 50% compressible, and 100% compressible), but the trend is representative of the benchmark’s complete results.
