The last week of May 2021, Phison shipped a handful of engineering-grade samples to media for evaluation. The samples use our PS5018-E18 reference design controller but feature Micron’s latest 176-layer 3D 3-bit per cell NAND flash media, sometimes referred to as B47R. The combination is the fastest E18 designed to date, and the fastest consumer SSD available today.
From the onset, we knew the E18 controller was very powerful and had the potential to produce the very best user experience for end users. Early media reports comparing Gen4 controllers from across the industry showed the E18 was the only one capable of achieving over 7400 MB/s sequential read and 7000 MB/s sequential write speeds. Inside Phison, we like to call this is the 7000-Club, and we have the only member.
For this article, we want to take a deep dive into what the press found with the new E18 B47R. We will use quotes from the articles from respective media and add some additional details.
“An SSD of this caliber, once available, will be geared toward the enthusiast, professional. Power user and gamer. Micron’s B47R 3D NAND flash memory, when paired with the Phison E18, provides a significant improvement in low QD random read and sequential speeds.” – The SSD Review
E18 Gaming – The best just got better
Phison spent a lot of time developing hardware and firmware to enhance the gaming experience. This comes in the form of leading the industry in game load times, the most annoying aspect of the gaming experience.
Image Credit: Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware produced a great set of game load-time results using the Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers benchmark. The results show two important things for the E18. The first is our existing E18 drives shipping with Micron B27B flash already outperform other products in gaming as shown here with the Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 7000. The second takeaway from the chart is the dominating performance of the new B47R equipped E18. The premium E18, that will ship in June 2021, loads the game at nearly one full second faster than the nearest competitor without an E18 controller.
“While Phison’s still at work optimizing the E18 for this new B47R flash, game-level load times in the Final Fantasy XIV have already shown significant improvement over the already-tuned Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 7000s with the older B27B 96L flash. This new sample is the fastest drive on the chart.” – Sean Webster, Tom’s Hardware
Maximizing PCIe Gen4 performance – The quest to a perfect 7,500
Modern consumer SSDs utilize four PCIe lanes. This is usually shown as PCIe 4.0 x4. The bandwidth available comes to 8GB/s (8,000 MB/s), twice as much bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4 (4,000 MB/s). Due to overhead, the maximum bandwidth we estimate possible is realistically 7,500 MB/s.
TweakTown and other review sites observed two trends when testing the Phison E18 B47R reference design drives on Intel and AMD platforms. Intel’s Z590 chipset paired with 11th Gen Core processor has slightly higher random performance, but AMD’s AM4 platforms deliver slightly higher sequential performance.
Image Credit: TweakTown
Our goal at Phison is perfection when possible. TweakTown nearly achieved perfection in the sequential read test using CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0. With the AMD Z570 chipset and a Ryzen 5900x, Jon Coulter recorded 7478 MB/s or just 22 MB/s short of what the theoretical maximum for PCIe 4.0 x4 may be able to deliver.
“Our AMD 5900X test bench is dishing out sequential read performance (lab record) that is up significantly over E18 powered SSDs with 96L flash arrays. The opposite is true for our Intel 11900K test bench, where we see an over 200 MB/s increase (lab record) in sequential write performance.” – Jon Coulter, TweakTown
File transfer performance – Where did the time go?
Maximizing performance in a lab environment is great but what you really want to see is real-world applications and tasks. We look to the excellent preview article from TechPowerUp to see what maximizing the available bandwidth does for you.
Image Credit: TechPowerUP
TechPowerUp transferred a Windows 10 ISO from one folder on the E18 B47R to another folder and found the large file transfer took just 3.9 seconds.
“While the performance gains are certainly impressive, the much bigger revelation, at least in my opinion, is how much sustained writes have improved. Up to today, even the fastest TLC SSDs would only achieve 1.5 GB/s with their pSLC cache exhausted. The new 176-layer NAND more than doubles that. We were able to fill the whole 2 TB capacity of the drive at 3.15 GB/s, which is faster than even the MLC-based Samsung 970 Pro. Yup, you read right—the 970 Pro is finally beat.” – W1zzard – TechPowerUp
World records and lab records – There can be only one
Existing retail products based on the Phison E18 currently own seven world-records for storage performance. TweakTown’s Jon Coulter and Xtreme System’s Charles “Fugger” Wirth set many of the records that stand today. In the TweakTown Preview of the E18 paired with B47R, the author wrote sixteen notations of new lab and world records using the new drive. The upcoming SSD when released will allow performance enthusiasts to reach new heights in storage and overall system-performance world records.
“As always, our primary focus is read performance. Here we are rewarded with a massive scoring increase for both our Intel and AMD test benches (lab records). Look at that 4K QD1, 105, and 108 MB/s? Incredible. Write scoring remains about the same as E18 with 96L flash. Overall scoring produces our first 12K plus (both lab records) scores for both platforms.” – Jon Coulter, TweakTown
Closing thoughts – What the experts say
Everyone at Phison is impressed with the professionalism and attention to detail from the reviewers we worked with. Technology preview articles are rare in this industry. Many companies only want to show finished products with a deep luster in perfect pictures and ideal conditions. We know enthusiasts love technology, just like we do, and we all want to be insiders with the most up to date knowledge of what is coming. Instead of hiding, we embrace your enthusiasm and curiosity.
With such great commentary from true experts in their field, we will conclude with their words about the Phison E18 B47R reference design from the technology preview articles.
“Here, we are getting 25% more performance with the new 176L flash. This will undoubtedly manifest itself as far better gaming performance and overall user experience. Performance where it matters most.” – TweakTown
“Phison E18 with Micron B47R Media: Ultra-Fast, Premium, PCIe 4.0 Storage” – Hot Hardware
“Short of picking and choosing our results from one side or the other (Intel/AMD), there is one thing that remained constant throughout testing on both Test Bench systems; the sample E18 B47R that we have in hand and put so many hours into testing, is the most powerful SSD to date that we have had tested… no hold barred.” – The SSD Review
“Despite its early firmware, the Phison E18 with Micron B47R clearly offered the best performance in PCMark 10’s trace-based benchmarks.” – Hot Hardware
“Overall, the new Phison PS5018-E18 looks to be a very successful release by the company. […] Phison E18 equipped SSD smoked the competition in most of our VDBench Workloads and boasted top-in-class numbers during the Blackmagic benchmark. Suffice to say, this came as somewhat of a pleasant surprise.” – Storage Review
“Phison’s PS5018-E18 is a high-end, high-performance PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD controller, and now paired with Micron’s fastest TLC flash yet is a powerhouse solution that outstrips the best of the best in real-world comparisons”. – Tom’s Hardware
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