At FMS 2024, Phison devoted important sales space area to their enterprise / datacenter SSD and PCIe retimer options, along with their shopper merchandise. As a controller / silicon vendor, Phison had traditionally been working with drive companions to deliver their options to the market. On the enterprise facet, their tie-up with Seagate for the X1 sequence (and the next Nytro-branded enterprise SSDs) is sort of well-known. Seagate equipped the necessities checklist and had a say within the last firmware earlier than qualifying the drives themselves for his or her datacenter clients. Such qualification includes a big useful resource funding that’s potential solely by massive firms (ruling out a lot of the tier-two shopper SSD distributors).
Phison had demonstrated the Gen 5 X2 platform eventually 12 months’s FMS as a continuation of the X1. However, with Seagate specializing in its HAMR ramp, and likewise combating different battles, Phison determined to go forward with the qualification course of for the X2 course of themselves. In the larger scheme of issues, Phison additionally realized that the white-labeling strategy to enterprise SSDs was not going to work out in the long term. As a end result, the Pascari model was born (ostensibly to make Phison’s enterprise SSDs extra accessible to finish shoppers).
Under the Pascari model, Phison has completely different lineups concentrating on completely different use-cases: from high-performance enterprise drives within the X sequence in addition drives within the B sequence. The AI sequence is available in variants supporting as much as 100 DWPD (extra on that within the aiDAPTIVE+ subsection beneath).
The D200V Gen 5 took pole place within the displayed drives, due to its main 61.44 TB capability level (a 122.88 TB drive can also be being deliberate beneath the identical line). The use of QLC on this capacity-focused line brings down the sustained sequential write speeds to 2.1 GBps, however these are meant for read-heavy workloads.
The X200, then again, is a Gen 5 eTLC drive boasting as much as 8.7 GBps sequential writes. It is available in read-centric (1 DWPD) and combined workload variants (three DWPD) in capacities as much as 30.72 TB. The X100 eTLC drive is an evolution of the X1 / Seagate Nytro 5050 platform, albeit with newer NAND and bigger capacities.
These drives include all the standard enterprise options together with power-loss safety, and FIPS certifiability. Though Phison did not promote this particularly, newer NVMe options like versatile information placement ought to develop into a part of the firmware options sooner or later.
100 GBps with Dual HighPoint Rocket 1608 Cards and Phison E26 SSDs
Though not strictly an enterprise demo, Phison did have a station exhibiting 100 GBps+ sequential reads and writes utilizing a traditional desktop workstation. The trick was putting in two HighPoint Rocket 1608A add-in playing cards (every with eight M.2 slots) and putting the 16 M.2 drives in a RAID zero configuration.
HighPoint Technology and Phison have been working collectively to qualify E26-based drives for this use-case, and we will likely be seeing extra on this in a later assessment.
aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite for AI Training
One of the extra attention-grabbing demonstrations in Phison’s sales space was the aiDAPTIV+ Pro suite. At final 12 months’s FMS, Phison had demonstrated a 40 DWPD SSD to be used with Chia (fortunately, that fad has light). The firm has been engaged on the acute endurance side and moved it as much as 60 DWPD (which is customary for the SLC-based cache drives from Micron and Solidigm).
At FMS 2024, the corporate took this SSD and added a middleware layer on prime to make sure that workloads stay extra sequential in nature. This drives up the endurance score to 100 DWPD. Now, this middleware layer is definitely a part of their AI coaching suite concentrating on small enterprise and medium enterprises who should not have the price range for a full-fledged DGX workstation, or for…
