Supposedly, the SSD based on PCIe 5.0 interface they should have been published last year, but they were delayed. The reasons for the delay are the thermal problems they have and their high price. Well, Phison launched the PS5031-E31T controller, which will reduce the price of these storage units.
These new PCIe 5.0-based SSDs offer read and write speeds of up to 14,000MB/s. That’s twice the performance of PCIe 4.0 drives and nearly five times the speeds of PCIe 3.0 SSDs.
An increase in performance that has a big problem: temperature. Due to this increase in performance, the temperatures generated by these units increase exponentially. Something that requires you to use a heatsink, in many cases with a built-in fan.
Price drop for new SSDs
Until now, Phison had on the market the PS5026-E26 controller for units of PCIe 5.0 high performance. This controller offers speeds of read up to 14,000 MB/s and write up to 11,800 MB/s. Moreover, this controller is made in the 12nm process and two Cortex R5 cores, also supporting DRAM memory.
New PS5031-E31T controller has important limitations. Happen 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.
Thanks to this improved manufacturing process and the reduction of cores, consumption and temperature are lowered. OK but does not solve the thermal problem background of PCIe 5.0 drives.
It incorporates a system of Fix LDPC ECC Error seventh generation. This controller must supports NVMe 2.0which is a significant leap from NVMe 1.4.
There are other cuts in this unit like not supporting independent cache memory and the communication channels go from 8 lines to 4 lines.
It was specifically designed for drives with an M.2 2280 form factor. This drive will offer AVERAGE for a total of 8TB, so we have another limitation.
What’s interesting is that we might see more 8TB drives than PCIe 4.0-based solutions. Nor much more, since it depends more on the manufacturers of memory units.
Regardless, these are still not interesting units
The performance jump of PCIe 3.0 SSDs over SATA is significant. The performance difference was very noticeable due to the limitations and lack of SATA interface enhancements. The performance difference between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 is no longer so noticeable.
If we talk about the move to PCIe 5.0, this is further mitigated. There comes a time when the loading times of video games are no longer enough. Even if you improve the storage speed, you won’t notice it. Another thing is different in advanced workloads like photo and video editing.
PCIe 5.0 SSDs have more negatives than positives. We are again facing capacity limitations, set at 8 TB. It is possible that the number of units with this capacity is very low.
Without a doubt, the bloodiest thing is having to put a heatsink with a fan to dissipate the heat. This shows how utterly meaningless these storage units are. Also, that it is necessary to rethink the connection system, which should mutate into something similar to the DIMM socket of the RAM memory.
