MSI und Phison gehen Partnerschaft ein, um Spatium E26 PCIe Gen5 AIC SSD auf den Markt zu bringen

Phison is on a mission to be the first to market with PCIe Gen 5 SSD controllers, having announced the E26-series controllers this CES. The company is ready with a branded drive under the MSI Spatinum brand, the MSI Spatium E26. Built in the PCIe add-in-card (AIC) Formfaktor, das Laufwerk verfügt über einen PCI-Express 5.0 x4-Schnittstelle (128 Gbit/s pro Richtung), and very likely sticks to the reference design that Phison demoed in its own booth.

This PCB is used in its client configuration, with just the controller, DRAM, and NAND flash chips; while the PCB allows an enterprise configuration with banks of capacitors offering explicit power-loss protection (the NAND flash chips offer implicit PLP). A simple copper-film heatspreader is used. Neither MSI nor Phison put out actual performance numbers, but mentioned sequential reads being “10 GB/s or beyond” (the interface is physically capable of 16 GB/s).

UPDATE: MSI clarified that this is not yet a shipping product, but a representation of what such a device could be. Daher, this should be considered a concept or at best proof of concept. Both MSI and Phison are actively working together on exploring what such a retail product could be.