Phison plans to release X2 enterprise SSDs with PCIe 5.0 speeds and 128 TB capacity

Even though HDDs are mostly obsolete, they still provide the best price per GB ratio especially for enterprise and server storage. Anything beyond 8 TB for SSD is still considerably more expensive compared to HDDs, but companies like Samsung, Silicon Motion and Phison are striving to make large capacity SSDs a thing. While Samsung believes it can provide petabyte scale products by the early 2030s, Phison is more focused to first deliver cost-effective 128 TB SSDs as soon as possible.

This year at CES, Phison showcased its updated X2 SSD platform that already reaches 61.44 TB and with the latest controllers, the capacity can be further expanded to 128 TB. Just like the latest consumer-level controllers, the X2 from Phison is compliant with the PCIe 5.0 X4 standard in dual-port format so the sequential read speeds and write speeds could reach 14 GB/s and 12 GB/s, respectively. Random reads can go up to 3 M IOPs, whereas random writes can hit 800 K IOPS. The X2 is built on TSMC’s older 12 nm nodes and supports the latest 3D NAND memory chips with 16 channels, plus it is AI future-proof with compatibility for computational storage devices, and comes in U.2 and E3.S form factors.

Phison barely featured the X2 capabilities at CES, mostly likely because the technology is not ready for mass adoption. The capacities can clearly scale beyond what HDDs offer right now, but it remains to be seen if SSD prices could decline to the point where they can compete with HDD solutions in the coming years.

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