Gigabyte releases Phison’s second-generation main PCIe 4.0 SSD: Read speed exceeds 7GB/s

Gigabyte today announced the launch of a new generation of PCIe 4.0 SSD model ‘ AORUS Gen4 7000s ‘.

The first release uses Phison ‘s second-generation master chip PS5018-E18  that has a performance increase of up to 55% over the previous generation and a continuous read speed that exceeds 7GB/s( 7000MB/s), known as the fastest in the world, this is the origin of 7000s in the model name.

Phison E18 main control is manufactured by TSMC 12nm process, self-developed multi-core architecture, eight-channel 32CE flash memory, supports PCIe 4.0, NVMe 1.4, DDR4/LPDDR4 cache, maximum capacity 8TB, power consumption only 3W, nominal continuous reading and writing up to 7.4GB /s, 7.0GB/s, random read and write all reach the level of million IOPS.

Compared to the first-generation E16, the performance of the new master is greatly improved, while the power consumption is significantly reduced, and there is no need for an exaggerated heat sink.

Gigabyte AORUS Gen4 7000s is a standard M.2 2280 form, and the flash memory is BiCS4 TLC from Toshiba. Compared with the Micron TLC used in the previous generation, the density is doubled, and the total capacity is still 2TB, with a 2GB DDR4 cache.

By looking at performance, the indicators given by Gigabyte are continuous read and write up to 7GB/s, 6.85GB/s, and random read and write up to 650K IOPS and 700K IOPS, which are slightly lower than those advertised by Phison, but I believe there is room for improvement in firmware optimization.

The average power consumption is 7.6W for reading and 8.4W for writing, and standby is less than 30mW. The heat sink is not as exaggerated as the previous generation, but it is still composed of nano-carbon coating, 7 mm thick heat sink, double-sided high-efficiency thermal pad, aluminum base, etc., and its efficiency is 20-30% higher than ordinary heat dissipation solutions.

A version with built-in dual heat pipes will be added later, but the volume will be larger. In terms of life, the mean time between failures is 1.6 million hours, the maximum write capacity is 1400TBW, the warranty is 5 years, and the average is 0.4 full-disk writes per day.

Gigabyte also emphasized that in addition to AMD 400/500 series and Intel 500 series motherboards, Gigabyte’s Intel Z490 motherboards have also been designed with PCIe 4.0 hardware in advance, and they can directly support PCIe 4.0 SSDs with the 11th generation Core.

(Source)