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The first (p)reviews are in, and critics are raving about game changing Phison's PS5031-E31T

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Phison took the wraps off its PS5031-E31T SSD controller at Computex 2023, with its DRAMless Gen5x4 single-CPU, built on TSMC's 7nm process, featuring an ARM Cortex R5 CPU and support for up to 8TB of 3D TLC and QLC NAND.

The first SSDs featuring the controller were teased at this year’s Computex, and now we’re starting to see previews of these drives.

KitGuru took a look at a 2TB reference drive from Phison (not a model that's actually destined to be sold) that uses the PS5031-E31T controller in combination with two packages of Kioxia BiCS8 3D TLC NAND.

The site’s Simon Crisp said “For the 1TB and 2TB reference designs Phison quotes Sequential read/write performance for the 2TB model as up to 10,300MB/s and 8,600MB/s respectively with the 1TB model a little slower at 10,200MB/s and 8,300MB/s for read and writes respectively. Random performance is rated at up to 1,300,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,500,000 IOPS for writes for both capacities.” These impressive figures were backed up by the benchmarks the site ran.

Summing up its experience with the drive, KitGuru said “Phison's PS5031-E31T controller is a game changer. It opens up the promise of seeing Gen 5 SSDs not only in the mainstream market segment but also in the notebook space, given the E31T has been designed to run cooler and more efficiently than the previous generation Gen 5 controllers.”

TweakTown ran a gamut of benchmarking tests on a similar drive, and while Crucial T705 2TB topped the PCMark 10 test, followed by Sabrent Rocket 5 2TB and MSI Spatium M580 4TB, Phison’s reference drive came in 19th out of 52, and you can only imagine how much faster an SSD with that controller would be in a drive from Crucial, Corsair or Seagate.

Summing up its findings, TweakTown said, “Phison Electronics does it again. As we see it, the world's first retail-ready PCIe Gen5 x4 controller is a smashing success. And by smashing, we mean by far the best-performing flash-based DRAMless SSD delivered to date. What the E31T has to offer is an important milestone in the history of solid-state storage. It's over 10,000 MB/s of power-efficient DRAMless mainstream consumer storage performance, which we've not seen before.”

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Declaring it a must-have and with a rating of 99%, TweakTown added, “Phison's E31T SSD controller is first to bring PCIe Gen5 x4 storage into the mainstream and does so with revolutionary combination of performance and efficiency.”

Tom’s Hardware produced a (p)review video the product which you can watch below. No surprises that it performed impressively. As the site says, “The SSD delivers excellent all-around performance, with excellent efficiency and power metrics, finally making PCIe 5.0 technology accessible to HTPCs, laptops, and more. Retail drives should begin shipping in the coming months, and it's a race now to see who will be first out the door.”

Wayne Williams is a freelancer writing news for TechRadar Pro. He has been writing about computers, technology, and the web for 30 years. In that time he wrote for most of the UK’s PC magazines, and launched, edited and published a number of them too.

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