A while ago, we brought a preview of the rather fantastic flagship Phison PS5026E-26 M.2 SSD. However, what’s unique is that you can’t actually buy that SSD. You see, Phison don’t actually make consumer drives, they make controllers. What they create are engineering samples of potential hardware that will then go to their partner brands. It’s more of a demonstration, really, and that’s exactly what we’ll be looking at again today with the Phision PS5028-E28 drive.

It’s worth keeping in mind that this is an engineering sample of sorts, so we won’t see the full potential of the controller today. Phison says they’re a few weeks away from releasing a fully optimised version to their partners, which will have even further reduced latency and other improvements to their firmware. From then on, it goes to brands to make it their own, where they can customise the DRAM, NAND, PCB, cooling and other components to their requirements, and push the performance even further.

Here are some of the key features and specifications you can expect from these drives based on this new controller. It’s a bit much to take in, but largely, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB variants, PCIe Gen5x4, and speeds of up to 14.9GB/s make it extremely fast. There’s a wealth of efficiency and data management features too, which is always great to see. One of the best features is that it’s also designed to be single-sided, providing it with a wider range of applications such as consoles, handhelds, and laptops, rather than just high-end desktops. Join me on the next page for a closer look at the physical hardware and some tasty benchmarks!

• Capacities:
• Form Factor:
• PCIe Interface:
• Compliance:
  • NVMe 2.0
  • PCI Express Base 5.0
• Flash Interface:
  • Transfer rate up to 2400MT/s
  • Up to 2pcs of BGA308 flash
• Performance:
  • Read: up to 14900 MB/s
  • Write: up to 14000 MB/s
• Reliability:
  • Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF): 1,500,000 hours
  • Uncorrectable Bit Error Rate (UBER):
• Temperature Range:
  • Operation: 0°C ~ 70°C
  • Storage: -40°C ~ 85°C
• Advanced Flash Management:
  • Dynamic Wear Leveling
  • Bad Block Management
  • TRIM
  • SMART
  • Over-Provision
  • Firmware Update
• Power Management:
  • PS0/PS1/PS2/PS3/PS4 Support
  • Support APST
  • Support ASPM
  • Support L1.2
• Power Consumption:
• RoHS-Compliant
• Features Support List:
  • All SRAM ECC protection
  • Thermal throttling
  • LDPC + RAID ECC
  • SmartRefresh™
  • Drive log
  • Support of TCG Pyrite