Phison E18 With Micron B47R Preview: Future Of PCIe 4 SSDs

Name: Phison E18
Brand: Phison

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, May 25, 2021, 08:00 AM EDT

Phison E18 with Micron B47R Media: More Benchmarks And Initial Thoughts

EFD Software's HD Tune is described on the company's website as such: "HD Tune is a hard disk utility with many functions. It can be used to measure the drive's performance, scan for errors, check the health status (S.M.A.R.T.), securely erase all data and much more." The latest version of the benchmark added temperature statistics and improved support for SSDs, among a few other updates and fixes.

HD Tune v5.75 Pro

More Info Here: http://www.hdtune.com

The Phison E18 with Micron B47R offered the best access times and burst rates according to HDTune, but couldn't quite catch the InnoGrit-based ADATA XPG Gammix S70 in the sequential transfer test.

CrystalDiskMark x64 Benchmarks

Synthetic File Transfer Tests

CrystalDiskMark is a synthetic benchmark that tests both sequential and random small and mid-sized file transfers using incompressible data. It provides a quick look at best and worst case scenarios with regard to SSD performance, best case being larger sequential transfers and worse case being small, random transfers.

Once again we see the Phison E18 with Micron B47R leading almost across the board, according to CrystalDiskMark. The Phison E18 SSD with Micron B47R NAND offered the best sequential speeds and the best low queue depth 4K transfers. Like we saw in IOMeter, it was only the Phison E16-based Gigabyte drive that pulled ahead in the high queue depth 4K transfers.

Futuremark's PCMark 10 Storage

http://www.futuremark.com

We like PCMark 10's new quick storage benchmark module for its real-world application measurement approach to testing. PCMark offers a trace-based measurement of system response times and bandwidth under various scripted workloads of traditional client / desktop system use cases.

Despite its early firmware, the Phison E18 with Micron B47R clearly offered the best performance in PCMark 10's trace-based benchmarks. A few short months ago, the Samsung SSD 980 Pro put up some of the strongest numbers we had seen in PCMark 10. It was soon outpaced by the InnoGrit-based ADATA drive. And even before hitting retail-ready status, the Phison E18 with Micron B47R put them both in its rearview mirror.

Unfortunately, we don't have any current-gen Phison E18-based drives or a WD_BLACK SN850 on hand for testing, which are also very strong performers, but the fact remains this early Phison E18 with its Micron B47R NAND Flash is a beast.

Phison E18 SSD With Micron B47R Initial Thoughts

We are not going to dwell too much on our benchmark results or draw any final conclusions on the Phison E18 with Micron B47R, based on our experience with this development drive, but we do believe it foreshadows what is coming down the pipeline.

Find Phison E18 Based Solid State Drives @ Amazon

A number of Phison's partners will be releasing E18-based enthusiast-class drives with Micron B47R NAND Flash in the not too distant future, and when that time comes, we suspect the drives are going to be highly competitive with some of the best options in the market currently available. Hopefully the emergence of Chia cryptocurrency doesn't do to SSDs was other coins have done to GPUs. Because when these drives hit, we suspect many enthusiasts will be itching to upgrade.