PHISON – E28 SSD Reveals The Secret To Breathing New Life Into Older Laptops & Desktop PCs

Now, you probably haven’t heard of Phison unless you’re really into your Solid State Drives (SSD), but for those that don’t know: Phison is a Taiwanese electronics company specializing in the design and manufacture of NAND flash controllers and storage solutions — and its storage controller designs are used in popular SSDs from mega brands like Seagate, Corsair, MSI, and Kingston.

As an M.2 SSD, it’ll slot into your desktop, laptop, and even a game console. Yes, you can even put this PCIe Gen 5 SSD into a PlayStation 5. But the real question is: is it worth looking for an SSD with a Phison E28 controller to get a few more years out of your old hardware? Let’s find out.

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Here’s the thing: Phison doesn’t sell SSDs directly to consumers.

In fact, Phison’s E28 is just a reference design. But you will find the E28 SSD controller used in various storage devices by major SSD manufacturers such as Seagate, Corsair, MSI, and Kingston in the coming days.

Because you won’t be purchasing the E28 directly from Phison, pricing will vary by OEM, but should remain relatively comparable to the highly-rated WD Black SN8100 (which typically retails at around $179 for the 1TB capacity, and climbs to $479 for 4TB).

As a note, Phison’s E28 ranges in storage capacity from 1TB to 8TB, though our E28 reference design was a 2TB solid-state drive.

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In addition to featuring the PCIe Gen 5 interface, the E28 storage controller is NVMe 2.0 and PCI Express Base 5.0 compliant. The SSD features a flash interface with transfer rates up to 2400MT/s with up to 2pcs of BGA308 flash.

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We typically measure SSD performance in read/write speeds, but for the Phison E28, we dove a little deeper into the SSD performance testing for a clearer image of just how good the E28 controller really is.

While the Phison E28 is not the top-performing SSD on every benchmark, it offers solid all-around performance across various benchmarks from the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test to CrystalDiskMark. The E28 was more mid-range on the 3DMark Storage Benchmark, but certainly within range of the best SSDs.

As our colleagues over at Tom’s Hardware point out in their preview coverage of the Phison E28, the drive is also rather power-efficient, making it a solid choice for desktops with lower power ceilings or for consoles and laptops.

The one caveat, of course, would be that the reference design Phison E28 doesn’t feature a heat sink, which can make it less than optimal for use inside a PS5 console.”- laptopmag.com

Source: laptopmag.com