As somewhat of a storage enthusiast, I pride myself in having a somewhat large capacity NAS in my lab with a decent number of 8TB drives. This array should keep me in pretty good shape for years to come, but I’m beginning to see that my current drives may be out of fashion thanks to some great engineering from Phison. Here at CES 2020 in Phison’s suite, we were shown working samples of 16TB, 2.5″ SSDs. Yes, we said 16TB.
Of course Phison doesn’t actually make SSDs, but they do create the controllers that various vendors utilize in their final products. And while Phison wasn’t able to name any names, we did see some working samples of these drives.
PS5012-E12S
Phison’s PS5012-E12S PCIe Gen 3 controller was paired up with Micron’s QLC NAND in order to provide up to 8TB of storage on a single M.2 2280-sized NVMe product. In order to fit that much NAND on the drive, Phison had to shrink the size of the controller just a bit in order to fit eight QLC modules; four on each side of the PCB.
PS3112-S12
Moving over to SATA, the PS3112-S12 controller enabled Phison to pack 16TB into a single 2.5″ drive. Again Phison has paired up with Micron’s 28nm QLC NAND in order to bring for this massive storage product. While this would add a significant amount of storage to a laptop or desktop system, we could really see drives designed for NAS or DAS units being popular with content creators.
Performance
The performance of each drive can be seen below, the 16TB PS3112-S12 configured SATA drive on the left, and the 8TB PS5012-E12S configured NVMe drive on the right.
Both of these controllers are going to enable some pretty cool products in the near future, and we can’t wait to see how vendors end up implementing them.