Phison Says SSD’s Speed Will Reach up to 6.5GB/s in 2020

SSDs have Large Room to Speed up

Relying on the Ryzen 3000 series processors and X570 chipset, AMD enters the field of PCI Express 4.0. Of course, this will lead to faster SSDs. However, the fact is that you see nothing now. When it will come? Phison says SSD’s speed will reach up to 6.5GB/s next year.

Perhaps, you don’t pay attention to these things. Here, we should tell you that AMD is the first enterprise to use the PCIe 4.0 bus spec that doubles the PCIe 3.0 bandwidth, and now every modern and current shipped motherboard is using it.

On a technical level, it has already been usurped by PCIe 5.0 that was only recently ratified. However, it will still take several years before we see the actual products which are using PCIe 5.0.

How about PCIe 4.0? Indeed, the same is not true of PCIe 4.0. Many enterprises have already announce their PCIe 4.0 SSDs, such as Gigabyte PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD, Essencore PCIe 4.0 SSD, and more. The same point is that all of these SSDa are using a Phison PS5016-E16 controller.

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These new drives’ sequential read speeds can reach up to 5GB/s in theory. You need to know that the read performance of the best NVMe SSDs is just about 3.5GB/s. The speed advantage of PCIe 4.0 SSD is obvious.

Phison Says SSD’s Speed Will Reach up to 6.5GB/s in 2020

For Phison, it has already begun to pay attention to its PS5016-E16 controller and it is working on a new controller that can support even faster speeds for SSDs. A video on YouTube from Mixed Skills shows that the Phison CEO K.S. Pua saying that the new controller is “coming in Q1 next year,” which can make the speed of SSD reaches up to 6.5GB/s.

On the technical side, the PCIe 4.0 controller supports about 2GB/s per lane. That is to say, in a x4 configuration, the bandwidth ceiling can sit at 8GB/s or so. Of course, you should know that it is the theoretical limit and doesn’t account for overhead. Moreover, there is still headroom to venture into the kind of territory that Phison is promising.

Compared to the existing SSDs, the incredible fast read speeds of SSD will not have any noticeable influence on gaming. However, if you want to transfer numerous large files, these faster SSDs can speed things up. Also it is important that a faster SSD can help drive down the price of current models. You can see this to some extent with more and more people could afford to buy the NVMe SSDs in the past few months.

However, a controller which can support 6.5GB/s read speeds will come soon doesn’t mean that SSDs will follow immediately then. For SSD market, it will still take some time to apply the new controller in it.

However, suppose that Phison is going to release its new controller in the first quarter in 2020, it’s to expect that faster SSDs will also come sometime in 2020.