Sneak Peek – Phison E12 High-Performance SSD Controller

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

Our first look at the Phison PS5012-E12 controller on a reference drive shows that Phison is able to produce a high performance SSD controllers like the other better known controller makers. The PS5012-E12 is able to deliver speeds over 3400 MB/s sequential read and over 3000 MB/s sequential write, which is mighty impressive. We came up a bit short of the 600,000 IOPS for 4K Random read/write, but we were still left impressed.

The Phison PS5012-E12 controller also appeared to be power efficient and didn’t have any idle power issues like we noticed on their low-cost PS5008-E8 controller. This is a great sign for a pre-production board as there were no power issues seen. The first public demo of the Phison PS5012-E12 controller was at CES 2018 and the drive there was using Toshiba’s BiCS3 64-layer TLC NAND Flash. That means Toshiba has spent at least the past 6 months working on the firmware and getting the performance to this level.

Phison says that the PS5012-E12 controller is capable of supporting up to 8TB of NAND Flash memory and will be available on drives using the M.2, U.2, and AIC form factors. Although upcoming 512Gbit NAND Flash will need to be used to reach an 8TB drive. It should be quickly mentioned that Phison also has the PS5012-E12DC controller, the enterprise optimized version of the PS5012-E12, that will be sampling in Q3, 2018. With 8TB drives possible that means 2U rack servers can hold 576TB of data on 72 8TB drives. Phison wants a piece of the highly profitable enterprise market where big data applications are booming and storage drives are needed in bulk in data centers.

The PS5012-E12 controller looks promising and we would like to thank Phison for allowing us to try out the reference drive they sent over. Now it is up to Phison’s customers to bring retail drives to market based on the PS5012-E12 controller!