Phison E31T Preview: PCIe Gen 5 SSDs Finally Go Mainstream

Phison E31T SSD Preview: PCIe 5 Solid State Drives Get More Affordable With Lower Power And Snappy Performance

	Phison E31T PCIe Gen 5 SSD: $TDB The new Phison E31T will power a new wave of affordable and efficient mainstream PCIe Gen 5 Solid State Drives, with solid performance, low power consumption and lower pricing, designed for desktop and mobile systems.
	•  Good Sequential Transfers    •  Low Power    •  No Heatsink Required (But Recommended)    •  Fast 4K Transfers At QD1	•  Not Always Faster Than Gen 4 Drives    •  Not Available Just Yet

For the last couple of years, the Phison E26 controller has dominated the PCIe Gen 5 SSD market. Some competitive platforms have also hit the scene recently, but the vast majority of Gen5 SSDs are still powered by the Phison E26. The Phison E26, however, squarely targets high-performance, enthusiast PC platforms, and requires enough power and cooling to preclude its use elsewhere. The E26’s power and cooling requirements generally make it unsuitable to notebooks and the PS5, for example, but Phison has a solution. Today, we’re able to give you a taste of the upcoming Phison E31T, a new, lower-power, native PCIe Gen 5 SSD platform that’s designed to be more affordable and go places the E26 can’t...

Phison E31T SSD Platform Specifications And Features

We should be clear out of the gate, that the Phison E31T drive we’ll be showing you here today is a reference drive, provided by Phison. The 2TB drive pictured on the next couple of pages won’t be available for purchase as-is, but it is the reference design Phison’s partners will use when devising their own products. As such, consider this data just a sneak peek at what the incoming wave of mainstream PCIe Gen 5 SSD can do. Keep in mind, however, Phison’s partners may opt for custom firmware that tweaks things a bit.

As you can see in the spec table above, the Phison E31T will be offered in 1TB and 2TB capacities, and will be capable of up to 10.3GB/s reads, with either 8.3GB/s or 8.6GB/s writes, depending on the capacity, with random read and write IOPS of up to 1.3M and 1.5M, respectively. Endurance is rated for 600TBW on the 1TB model and 1,200TBW on the 2TB model. And Phison also tells us the E31T is capable of putting up over 7GB/s in notebooks that offer only PCIe Gen5x2 M.2 slots, with the added benefit that the drives consume up to 34% lower power than Gen4x4 drives that offer similar performance (7GB/s).

The Phison E31T is a native PCIe Gen 5 controller, with 4 lanes of PCIe connectivity, that’s manufactured on TSMC’s 7nm process node. Paired to the controller are a couple of pieces of Kioxia BiCS8 3D TLC NAND, operating at 3,600MT/s. The combination of TSMC’s 7nm manufacturing process, the lack of DRAM (Phison E31T-based drives will be DRAM-less HMB devices), the E31T’s updated architecture, and Kioxia BiCS8 3D TLC NAND, results is a relatively low-power drive that’ll be right at home in notebooks and laptops. The PS4 power state is only 3.5mW and the drives peak at only 6.1W. Average power is 5.9W, however.

Due to its relatively low-power operation, the Phison E31T does not require a heatsink, but one is recommended for extended workloads, as the case with virtually all modern SSDs.

The drive itself is about as simple, and clean as can be. The controler and a couple of pieces of NAND are mounted on the top of the PCB, along with a handul of surface mounted compoments, and the backside of the PCB is completely bare. The form-factor pictued here is a common 2280 gumstick, but we suspect smaller drives based on the E31T will arrive at some point in the future as well.

To see where the Phison’s E31T falls relative to other drives on the market, we compared its performance to a varied mix of PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 drives, including a couple based on Phison’s higher-end E26 Gen 5 controller. Take a look...

Phison E31T PCIe Gen 5 SSD Benchmarks

Under each test condition, the SSDs featured here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Our testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and Windows 11 was fully updated as well. Windows Firewall, automatic updates, and screen savers were all disabled before testing, and Focus Assist was enabled to prevent any interruptions.

In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test. All of the drives here have also been updated to their latest firmware as of press time. Where applicable, we would also typically use any proprietary NVMe drivers available from a given manufacturer. When not available, the drives used the in-box Microsoft NVMe driver included with Windows 11.

HotHardware's Test System:

IOMeter Benchmarks

IOMeter is a well-respected industry standard benchmark. However, despite our results with IOMeter scaling as expected, it is debatable as to whether or not certain access patterns actually provide a valid example of real-world performance. The access patterns we tested may not reflect your particular workloads, for example, or mirror the behavior of actual applications. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative throughput, latency, and bandwidth with a given storage solution. In addition, there are certain highly-strenuous workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools. 

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; a custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, consisting of 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (33% writes) and 100% random access. Queue depths from 1 to 16 were tested...

The Phison E31T-based reference drive trailed all of the other drives we tested with both access patterens, across every queue depth. We should point out, however, that the PCIe Gen 4 drives represented in our reference data are relatively high-end offerings, with DRAM. Lower-end DRAM-less designs would not have fared as well.

In terms of its average transer speeds with both access patterns, the Phison E31T-based drives oviously trailed the pack due to its lower throughput.

Latency was also somewhat higher on the Phison E31T-based drive according to IOMeter, but was still within striking distance of the higher-end drives we tested.

SiSoft SANDRA 2022

Next, we used SiSoft SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant for some quick tests. Here, we used the File System Test and provide the results from our comparison SSDs. Read and write performance metrics, along with the overall drive score, are detailed below.

SANDRA's File System Benchmark had the Phison E31T-based drive landing in the middle of the pack, outpacing all of the PCIe Gen 4 drives and trailing only the higher-end Phison E26-based offerings from Seagate and MSI.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO is another "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5KB through 64MB transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

Once it got rolling at about the 64K transfer size, the Phison E31T was able to stretch its legs and land in second place overall, behind only the higher-end Phison-based MSI Spatium M570 Pro.

Read and write IO throughput was a mixed bag. The Phison E31T was competitive with the other drives throughout, but laned about in the middle of the pack in the write test. However, it typically trailed in the read test.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark

Next up we ran the Compression Benchmark built-into AS SSD, an SSD specific benchmark being developed by Alex Intelligent Software. This test is interesting because it uses a mix of compressible and non-compressible data and outputs both Read and Write throughput of the drive. We only graphed a small fraction of the data (1% compressible, 50% compressible, and 100% compressible), but the trend is representative of the benchmark’s complete results.

The compressibility of the data being transferred across the drives we tested had virtually no impact on performance, and the Phison E31T landed about in the middle of the pack, well ahead of all of the PCIe Gen 4 drives.

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