The Phison E12 Reference Design Preview: A Next-Gen NVMe SSD Controller
by Billy Tallis on July 18, 2018 10:30 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The average data rates of the Phison E12 on the Light test are solidly high-end, but not record setting and the full-drive performance loss is more significant than on most competing drives.
The Phison E12's average and 99th percentile latencies on the Light test are great, but it's hardly the only drive offering this level of performance. The Samsung 970 EVO has better latency scores all around, and a clear lead for the 99th percentile latency.
The average write latencies from the Phison E12 are top-notch and similar to the best drives from Samsung and WD, but the average read latencies are slightly slower than the top drives, especially when the test is run on a full drive.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies are all excellent. The HP EX920 and the Intel Optane SSD 900P manage to have better full-drive read latency, but otherwise the Phison E12 is as good as anything at keeping latency reliably low.
The Phison E12's energy usage ranks similarly to how it ranked on the other ATSB tests: The WD Black is still the most efficient NVMe SSD and the only one that really rivals good SATA drives, and the latest Phison controllers are the next most efficient, with the low-end/low-power E8 slightly ahead of the E12.
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Tastydirt - Sunday, August 5, 2018 - link
Not necessarily, depending on workload. A drive like this will read/write 4-8x faster than a SATA drive, allowing it to drop back into idle state much faster. This would probably result in lower total power consumption per byte read.DanNeely - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link
looks like a solid design to me, no bad results anywhere and optimizing for low latency over peak throughput in consumer scenarios is probably the better choice.takeshi7 - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link
I wish they kept the flip chip BGA design of the E7. It just looks cooler with the exposed die.imaheadcase - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link
Plan on admiring it inside case huh?FATCamaro - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link
He’s going to watch all those bits moving around the chip.Alistair - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link
A nice new possibility, but like the HP drive surprised me when I opened it, the Phison is double-sided unfortunately. I'd rather not buy Samsung, but Samsung being single-sided is a big plus.imaheadcase - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link
A big plus for what?DanNeely - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link
compatibility with laptops that don't have enough Z height for a 2 sided m.2 card.romrunning - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link
It can also help with the cooling, if the controller is being impacted by higher thermals. The board-facing side may not have enough space to add even a small heatsink. Single-sided M.2 drives can benefit from placing the heatsink on the top side, along with whatever better airflow there may be the top side as well.siuol11 - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link
I really wish someone besides Samsung would make a "performance" drive with MLC, I'm not interested in using a TLC drive for a windows install. AFAIK there are no direct competitors to Samsung's Pro drives, and the prices have consequently continued to stay high.