Phison said that the PCI-E 5.0 SSD may require active heatsinks
Phison launched its first PCI-E 5.0 master controller, PS5026-E26, as early as September last year. Of course, this master controller will not be put into production until the second half of this year. This master controller can read up to 12GB/s, write at 11GB/s, and randomly read 1.5 million IOPS in 4K. But higher performance will bring more heat, PCI-E SSD will be hotter than today’s SSD, thermal management is crucial.
Phison’s latest blog featured an interview with their CTO Sebastien Jean, who talked about the thermal management of SSDs, as the performance of SSDs has grown, any handling of higher heat is a challenge, and in the era of PCI-E 4.0, many SSDs are equipped with heatsinks, some SSDs come with radiators that are quite large. If there is enough airflow in the case, there will be no problem with heat dissipation.”There are lots of things that we are doing to keep the SSD power within a reasonable envelope,” said Sebastien Jean, Chief Technical Officer at Phison, in a recent interview. “But for sure, the SSDs are going to be hotter, in the same way that CPU and GPU got hotter in the 1990s. As we move to Gen5 and Gen6, we may need to consider active cooling.”
For every 1GB/s increase in the performance of the SSD, the power of the small core will be increased by about 1W, which also means higher heat generation, although the relationship between power and performance is not completely linear, which has a certain relationship with changes in design and technology, it still has certain participation value. The power consumption of PCI-E 5.0 SSDs will further increase, and Phison engineers are studying how to manage the power requirements of the new generation of SSDs and minimize thermal issues.
