Sony Enters SSD Market with Phison S10-Based SLW-M Series

Sony-Asia this month introduced its first own-brand solid-state drives that it will sell in retail. The decision to start selling consumer SSDs is completely unexpected because Sony has been trying to focus solely on highly profitable and less competitive businesses in the recent years, whereas the competition in the market of consumer storage is fierce. Initially, the company will sell only two SSD models, which means that it is trying to test a new business rather than to become a leader on the market.

Sony’s SLW-M SSDs come in 2.5-inch/7 mm form-factor (a special bracket to install the drives into 9.5-mm bays is included) and feature 240 GB (SLW-MG2) or 480 GB (SLW-MG4) capacities. The drives use SATA-6 Gbps interface and hence Sony can address the vast majority of desktop and laptop PCs with its first-gen SSDs. According to Sony, the SLW-M solid-state drives feature up to 560 MB/s sequential write speed and up to 530 MB/s sequential write speed. Each drives comes equipped with the Acronis True image 2015 and Sony SSD ToolBox software for managing and saving your data.

The Sony SLW-M SSDs are based on the Phison PS3110-S10 controller as well as Toshiba’s TLC flash memory, according to images published by DIYPC.hk web-site. The SLW-MG2 solid-state drive from Sony features 128 MB DDR3 buffer made by Nanya. Usage of TLC NAND indicates that Sony’s SLW-M are entry-level client solid-state solutions that do not cost a lot to make and are not supposed to be expensive, and based on the specifications listed it’s a reasonable guess that performance will be near the similarly-built low-end OCZ Trion 100 series.

Meanwhile with the Sony drives it’s worth noting that Phison not only sells controller chips to makers of SSDs, but actual turnkey solutions, which include ASICs, firmware, reference designs of solid-state drives, software, and so on, and this appears to be what Sony is doing. The PCB design of Sony’s SLW-M resembles that of Kingston’s HyperX Savage, Corsair’s Neutron XT and Patriot’s Ignite, while Sony’s SSD ToolBox is rebranded Phison ToolBox.

Many new SSD suppliers acquire Phison’s turnkey solutions in order to produce own drives and find out whether they can successfully sell such products to their customers via their sales channels. For example, Zotac last year introduced its first SSDs powered by Phison’s PS3110-S10 controllers and Toshiba’s MLC NAND flash memory.

Sony’s SSD plans are not completely clear. At present, the company only sells its solid-state drives in select Asian markets and it is unknown whether Sony has plans to offer similar products in the U.S. or Europe. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that the company, which has been withdrawing from commoditized markets for years, is trying to sell its own SSDs. Nowadays solid-state drives are not as cheap as HDDs, but in the entry level the competition is fierce and margins are low.

OCZ Releases Trion 150 SSD

As previewed at CES, OCZ has released an update to their budget-oriented Trion 100 SATA SSD. The Trion 150 switches from parent company Toshiba’s A19nm TLC to their 15nm TLC, the densest planar NAND on the market. The transition to 15nm NAND has been slow for Toshiba and SanDisk, and the release of the Trion 150 signals that the 15nm TLC is finally ready to compete in the most cost-sensitive market segment. This is also probably the end of the road for Toshiba’s planar NAND and the Trion 150 will probably be the cheapest drive from Toshiba or OCZ until their 3D NAND ships, unless they introduce a drive with a DRAM-less controller.

The specifications for the Trion 150 are otherwise unchanged from the Trion 100, but the press releases have mentioned some improvements in sustained performance. Supporting the 15nm NAND required at least some firmware tweaks and it’s possible that some performance optimizations were introduced as well. It’s also possible that the Trion 150 adopts more overprovisioning or larger SLC-mode caches.

We initially found the Trion 100 to be a fairly poor performer compared to other modern SSDs, but its pricing of late has been very low and more recent TLC drives like Crucial’s BX200 have sacrificed even more performance for the goal of affordability. The allure of the cheapest TLC SSDs has been reduced by the availability of some decent MLC drives for only slightly higher prices, such as Mushkin’s Reactor. With the switch to denser NAND, the Trion 150 may be able to widen the gap and take a clear lead in affordability over MLC drives. Even if the Trion 150 turns out to be another step in the race to the bottom among value SSDs, it will still vastly outperform hard drives, and that’s all that value SSDs are really aiming for at the moment. On the other hand, if it does offer significant real-world performance improvements without any price increase, it can probably be competitive against other value SSDs at some capacities.

OCZ hasn’t announced pricing for the Trion 150, but Newegg is currently listing the Trion 150 at around $0.29/GB for the 240GB and larger capacities and Amazon’s listing (not in stock yet) has the 120GB drive slightly cheaper.

CES 2016: Phison previews upcoming SSD controllers

Phison may not be a household name, but they’re a major player in the SSD market. Where Marvell’s SSD controllers are typically sold to drive vendors who then pair them with custom or third-party firmware, and SandForce and Silicon Motion controllers are typically bundled with firmware, Phison’s controllers are mostly sold as part of a turnkey drive platform that’s ready to be put into a branded case and put on store shelves. This business model has made Phison the favorite supplier for new players in the SSD market with no existing drive manufacturing infrastructure, and for established brands that need to update their product line but can’t stomach the high R&D costs of staying competitive with custom controllers or firmware.

For 2016, the mainstay of Phison’s controller lineup will continue to be the PS3110-S10, which has been used in drives sold by OCZ/Toshiba, Mushkin, Corsair, Zotac, Patriot, Kingston, PNY and others, and paired with both TLC and MLC NAND. Squeezing in below the S10 and more or less displacing the S9 will be the new PS3111-S11 low-cost SATA controller with the option of operating as a DRAM-less controller and providing only two NAND channels but also the first Low Density Parity Correction (LDPC) support from Phison. Thanks to SLC caching support its peak performance numbers only suffer slightly and its support of capacities up to 1TB should be sufficient for this year’s value SSDs, but don’t expect the S11 to sustain great performance on heavy workloads.

The much more exciting product is Phison’s PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD controller, the PS5007-E7. The E7 controller is very close to launch and we’ve already seen numerous product announcements based on that platform. The E7 is aiming to be the highest performance consumer SSD controller and will be competing directly against Samsung’s 950 Pro. The controller hardware has been finalized and the firmware is in the last stages of performance optimization. Phison plans to finalize the firmware in February and drives should be on the shelves in March.

We’ve previously seen prototypes of the E7 controller from G.Skill at Computex last year and from Mushkin at CES 2015. Since Computes the write performance specifications have improved slightly: sequential write is up from 1400MB/s to 1500MB/s, and random write is up from 200k IOPS to 250k IOPS. Sequential read and random read speeds published by Phison match what G.Skill said at Computex: 2600MB/s sequential read and 300k IOPS for random read, though Phison notes their random performance numbers as being burst performance. They also are claiming a sustained random performance of 36k IOPS, presumably referring to steady-state random writes. Those numbers are all for planar MLC NAND, but the E7 controller also supports TLC and 3D NAND. Given the imminent availability of 3D NAND, Phison is also able to declare support for capacities up to 4 TB where G.Skill’s demo only promised up to 2TB.

Phison E7 drives will be available in a variety of form factors. M.2-2280 has been the most popular choice for client PCIe SSDs, but some E7-based drives will be opting for the longer M.2-22110 size. This will provide room for 8 flash packages instead of 4, allowing for higher capacities or cheaper NAND packaging by stacking fewer dies per package. Most importantly, the larger M.2 card will make it possible to populate all 8 channels on the E7 controller while still using standard off the shelf flash packages. The longer M.2 size won’t be usable with as many motherboards and will have even more trouble in the notebook market, but many SSD vendors targeting the enthusiast market are willing to make those compromises.

Several vendors will also be selling drives in a PCIe half-height half-length add-in card form factor. This relatively spacious PCB allows for the highest capacities and better passive cooling with or without a heatsink. Phison’s reference model also included power loss protection capacitors on the card, though they won’t be present on all retail models—Patriot’s Hellfire AIC didn’t have the capacitor bank populated. Phison also showed a 2.5″ U.2 model, but we didn’t encounter any vendors that were showing off that option.

The add-in cards and U.2 drives may be more popular in the enterprise market, which Phison is confident they can break into. However, Phison teamed up with Kingston and Liqid to demonstrate an add-in card that puts four M.2 drives under a heatsink and provides power loss protection capacitors. This can allow for better density and utilization of PCIe slots than a single-controller PCIe x4 add-in card and drop-in compatibility for server platforms that don’t have U.2 backplanes, so even in the enterprise space M.2 might win out.

Gallery: Phison E7 drives at CES 2016