Samsung has predicted that we can expect the capacity of a single SSD to reach 1PB in the next decade, a prediction that emerged when the company showcased a 128TB SSD prototype at the Flash Memory Summit in San Jose in 2022, calling it “petabyte-scale product.”
While Samsung has since released a 128TB SSD with a proprietary controller, and Silicon Motion has an SSD controller that can support up to 128TB, SSDs of that size remain disappointingly rare.
At CES 2024, Phison demonstrated a range of portable SSDs and SSD controllers, including its X2 enterprise SSD platform. On the company's site, it is listed as “the best-in-class enterprise SSD” available in capacities from 1.92TB to 61.44TB. However, something that very few people noticed was that the version presented at CES had a capacity of up to 128TB.
Not yelling about it…yet!
Although details are very scarce beyond the information found on the Phison media platform published before the show, we do know that the highlights of the X2 controller (beyond the massive capacity) include:
- Dual-port PCIe Gen5x4
- TSMC 12nm process
- 16 channels,
- 3D NAND
- Computational Storage Devices (CSD)
We also know that it will come in U.2, E3.S form factors.
Phison also revealed that its device offers the best performance per watt and features sequential read speeds of over 14GB/s, sequential write speeds of 12GB/s, random read speeds of 3000K IOPS, and random write speeds. 800K IOPS.
It's clear from the lack of fuss that Phison isn't ready to talk about the updated are starting to become more common, even if 1PB units remain a distant dream for now.
