Phison E28 SSD：14.9 GB/s 和您所見過的最低延遲

For Phison, Computex 2025 served as a launch event for the upcoming PS5028-E28. Even though we announced several great products at the show, such as the new X200Z SLC enterprise cache SSD, which complements our D200V QLC series, and new form factors for the PS5031-E31T, it is hard to overshadow a towering flagship product. The new E28 was the talk of 電腦展 and won several “Best of Computex” awards from trusted media eager to test the new class-leading enthusiast drive.  

 The E28 controller (image courtesy of The FPS Review) 

Meet the Phison E28

We first announced the E28 controller at CES 2025 in early January. At the time, the press release featured rough estimates of the 8-channel controller’s performance that is destined to replace the successful E26, which dominated the PCIe Gen5 SSD market for over a year without a competitor. With E28, however, we turned it up to 11… well, actually, make that 14.9! 

Comparing the specifications of the new E28 to the aging E26 gives us a strong understanding of what Phison’s R&D teams worked so diligently on. Shifting to the improved TSMC 6nm process node significantly lowers power at idle and full load. This enables the E28 to run the 2400 MT/s NAND without throttling its performance. The result is nearly a 5% increase in sequential reads and a 16% increase in sequential write performance. Larger gains were achieved in random performance, where both reads and writes showed a massive 67% increase. (Later in this article, we’ll show what that means in real-world performance.)  

Power consumption is an area everyone understands without elaborate charts, especially in this case. It was nearly impossible to use the E26 in a notebook. On a desktop, the E26 products required a heatsink. With a 30% reduction in active power usage and a whopping 94% decrease in idle power, E28 can run in a notebook and even in a desktop without a heatsink. We still recommend using your motherboard’s supplied heatsink with E28, but this is only to prevent thermal throttling on extended workloads, such as massive file transfers. It’s not required, though.  

Not listed in the specifications is the NAND Phison used. E28 can outperform our competitors in the 2025 premium SSD race using 2400 MT/s NAND, whereas our competitors were forced to use 3600 MT/s NAND, which consumes more power and generates more heat.  

The ability to utilize slower NAND is a testament to Phison’s superior controller architecture, which employs a mix of large and small compute cores. The smaller cores, known as CoX Processors, are highly efficient and designed to run background activities, such as garbage collection. This represents a radical design change compared to the rest of the SSD market, where companies typically add more ARM R5 and ARM R8 cores to the controller. Many of our competitors have up to five of these less-efficient cores in Gen5 designs. 

E28 real-world performance

Using an Intel Core i9-14900K in a Z790 chipset motherboard, we achieved a 24.28% performance increase over the base E26 (with 2000 MT/s NAND) in PCMark 10. This test measures workload traces of real-world applications that most of us use every day. The new Phison E28, even with beta firmware, walks away from the competition. We expect the retail products to deliver even more performance after the firmware is fully optimized for real-world software and data transfers. 

Comparison of the Phison E28’s throughput against competitors.  

Power comparisons

The power discussion has followed Gen5 SSDs ever since Phison released its E26-controlled products in early 2024. Some of the information is accurate, but much of it has also been misinterpreted. E26 never required a fan on the heatsink, as long as airflow was maintained through your chassis. In what I would call a misrepresentation of information, one competitor stated their Gen5 flagship, also built on TSMC 6nm technology, would consume less than 5 watts. We found the claim to be misleading when tested, as shown in the results above. 

See what professional reviewers are saying

Following Computex 2025, we sent several drives to key storage media outlets to gather feedback from experienced professionals and provide the public with a sneak peek of E28. Here some of what the pros are saying.   

湯姆的硬件
Phison E28 2TB SSD Review: A return for vengeance 

“…if you’re looking for the combination of best performance and power efficiency, your search ends here. An E28-based SSD will work in just about any system for almost any application, and it’ll handle most things better than other drives on the market.” 

存儲審查
Phison E28 SSD Controller First Take: Exceptional Gen5 Speeds Meet Enhanced Power Management 

“Throughout our extensive testing, the E28-powered SSD consistently maintained performance parity with, or even exceeded, that of top-tier Gen5 drives, particularly in sequential and 4K random workloads. Its random write IOPS that hit an unmatched 3.29 million, and its read latency often outperforms competitors like the SN8100 and Renegade G5, showcasing just how much tuning Phison has done under the hood.” 

SSD評論
Phison PS5028-E28 Gen5 Reference Design SSD Preview – An Unexpected Match-Up of the Best 

“I am pretty sure that the Phison PS5028-E28 Gen5 SSD controller is the first time an SSD has ever returned a low [queue depth] 4K random write result of over 500 MB/s in our testing. The direct result of this is that it then provided the best real-world data transfer testing that we had ever seen from an SSD, specifically in its transfer of small 4K OS data.” 

The FPS Review
Phison PS5028-E28 Reference Design 2TB PCIe Gen5 M.2 NVMe SSD Preview and Benchmarks 

“This is another one of those benchmarks where we had to run it several times to make sure we weren’t going crazy, and we were not. The Phison PS5028-E28 Reference Design 2TB SSD is truly a masterpiece when it comes to workstation-class workloads, able to give a SPECworkstation 3.1 score of 14.2, the highest we’ve ever seen. At this performance level, it is 66% faster than the next fastest drive, and 82% faster than the ADATA LEGEND 970 PRO, which uses the slower InnoGrit controller, which doesn’t do well in workstation performance. Phison said the E28 was also designed for enterprise applications, and SPECworkstation 3.1 proves its performance for the workstation and enterprise sectors.” 

Tweakers
First SSD with Phison E28 Controller Preview (via Google Translate) 

“Phison has undoubtedly solved that energy problem with the E28, also with our engineering sample. The 2TB drive that we tested is the most economical Gen5 drive that we have seen so far. The performance is also good, because even with some optimizations in the pipeline, the drive scores as the best or one of the best in almost all our benchmarks.“

Level1Techs (YouTube)
Phison’s NEW SSD Controller: Better Laptop Battery, Faster Performance! 

“I can get 30 more minutes of battery life just by changing the M.2 [SSD] in my Framework Laptop.” 

調整鎮
Phison E28 SSD Controller Preview – The Empire Strikes Back 

“Of all the benchmarks we run, it can be argued that this one offers the best reflection of a typical consumer use case scenario. Well, look at that! Another lab record for a flash-based SSD falls to our E28-controlled engineering sample. The most performance where it matters most. A score of 10K here is charging into Optane P5800X territory, and including the P5800X, has only been achieved three times. Incredible.” 

Phison delivers the performance customers demand

I’ll conclude this post with words from Jon Coulter in TweakTown’s preview linked above: “The Phison Empire Strikes Back in a huge way. The E28 engineering sample SSD that we tested today delivered what we would consider to be equivalent real-world performance to that of our current performance champion, the WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB. Additionally, we are solidly of the opinion that with firmware maturity and a better-grade flash array, the E28 controller will indeed deliver the consumer performance crown back to the Phison Storage Empire.” 

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