Phison is on a mission to be the first to market with PCIe Gen 5 SSD controllers, having announced the E26-series controllers this CES. The company is ready with a branded drive under the MSI Spatinum brand, the MSI Spatium E26. Built in the PCIe add-in-card (AIC) form-factor, the drive features a PCI-Express 5.0 x4 interface (128 Gbps per direction), and very likely sticks to the reference design that Phison demoed in its own booth.
This PCB is used in its client configuration, with just the controller, DRAM, and NAND flash chips; while the PCB allows an enterprise configuration with banks of capacitors offering explicit power-loss protection (the NAND flash chips offer implicit PLP). A simple copper-film heatspreader is used. Neither MSI nor Phison put out actual performance numbers, but mentioned sequential reads being "10 GB/s or beyond" (the interface is physically capable of 16 GB/s).
