When it comes to PCI-Express 5.0 or Gen5 NVMe solid state drives a considerable amount of them over the past couple of years have been powered by Phison’s E26 controller. While this controller was quite good, like many other Gen5 solutions there were power concerns, which of course led to quite a lot of heat as well. This meant for many of the drives you needed an active cooling solution. Phison has worked on many of these concerns and they are now releasing their E28 controller, which you’ll see powering many partner drives over the next couple of years. They sent us over a 2TB reference drive, which features their E28 controller teamed with KIOXIA BiCS8 218-layer TLC 3D NAND flash. Let’s take a look and see what you can expect from drives based on this controller!
Special thanks to Phison for providing us with the PS5028-E28 Reference Design Gen5 Solid State Drive to review.
Phison PS5028-E28 Reference Design Gen5 Solid State Drive Overview
The Phison PS5028-E28 looks like your typical M.2 2280 (80mm) drive. They have thrown a Phison sticker on one side.
Flipping the drive over we find what actually powers it. This is going to be a PCI-Express 5.0 x4 drive that makes use of an 8-channel controller, 2 flash memory chips, and a single DRAM cache chip.
The Phison PS5028-E28 controller sits on one end of the drive. This controller features a 3-core design with two proprietary Phison CoX-processors and supports the NVMe 2.0 protocol. Our drive did not come with a heatsink, but for most desktop users that shouldn’t be a problem as your motherboard will be M.2 heatsinks.
Moving on to the flash, Phison has paired the controller with KIOXIA BiCS8 218-layer TLC 3D NAND flash. You will find these 2 chips on the other end of the drive. Between the flash and the controller is your DRAM cache. If you are wondering about speed Phison rates this drive at 14900 MB/s read and 14000 MB/s write for the 2TB version.
