Sneak Peek – Phison E12 High-Performance SSD Controller

By Nathan Kirsch

ATTO & CrystalDiskMark

ATTO v3.05

ATTO is one of the oldest drive benchmarks still being used today and is still very relevant in the SSD world. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that can be very easily interpreted. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5KB through 64MB transfer sizes with the total length being 256MB.

ATTO – Phison E12 960GB:

Benchmark Results: ATTO Disk Benchmark had the Phison E12 960GB M.2 PCIe NVMe drive reaching speeds of up to 3,455 MB/s read and 3,007 MB/s write in the standard overlapped I/O benchmark. Phison claims that the E12 controller can hit sequential speeds of up to 3400 MB/s read and 3000 MB/s write and we were able to exceed those speeds on out Intel Z370 test platform.

Benchmark Results: Compared to some other SATA III and PCIe NVMe SSDs, the Phison E12 960GB drive performs really well when it comes to sequential read performance and once it reaches 64KB transfer sizes the only drive series observed being faster was the Samsung SSD 970 PRO.

Benchmark Results: The ATTO sequential write performance numbers on the Phison E12 960GB drive are about as good as you can get on the larger transfer sizes. Once E12 drive was above transferring blocks 64KB and larger it was the fastest drive on the chart.

CrystalDiskMark 6.0.0 x64

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) and shows the highest score of five runs.

CystalDiskmark – Phison E12 960GB:

Benchmark Results: The E12 960GB reference drive topped out at 3471.1 MB/s read and 3001.9 MB/s write in the standard sequential write test that is done at QD32. Random 4K QD1 performance was 48.81 MB/s read and 156.4 MB/s write. Hard to complain about those numbers!

Let’s look at some other benchmarks!