Final Thoughts on the Phison PS5028-E28 Reference Design SSD
One of the biggest issues with Phison E26-based solid state drives was their power consumption and heat. Pretty much all of the ones that we tested required some type of active cooling solution, which was not necessarily ideal. Let’s just say those little fans were not that quiet!
With the E28 Phison has worked on those issues and they have put out a product that is more power efficient and effectively runs cooler as well. This means that you should see non-heatsink versions of drives based on the E28 where you motherboard’s M.2 heatsinks should suffice. Also heatsink versions shouldn’t require active cooling, which will definitely persuade more people to choose these type of drives.
When it comes to performance we were quite impressed with the Phison E28 controller teamed with the KIOXIA BiCS8 218-layer TLC 3D NAND flash. It performed very close to the advertised speeds and we can only expect this performance to get better with firmware optimizations. The firmware that we tested the drive with was pre-release firmware, so it is only going to get better going forward. Performance will vary depending on platform with Intel systems being better for random IO performance while AMD systems will be better for sequential performance.
It is great to see Phison address some of the setbacks of the E26 controller. I can see so many different brands adopting this controller and implementing their own firmware and cooling solutions. If you are looking to pick up a new PCI-Express 5.0 solid state drive this year I can definitely recommend one based on the Phison E28 controller!
