Phison PS5026-E26 Max14um Preview – A Taste of M.2 Storage’s Future

Overview

As we said, you’ll see variants of this drive hitting the market from Phisons many partners throughout 2024, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a fair few of these revealed at CES 2024 this week, and even more throughout the year. We’ve already seen one is coming from Sabrent as you can see in the post below.

Phison has really put a lot of effort into the design here, pushing the PCIe 5.0 and M.2 standards to their current limits for the first time using consumer hardware. We’ve seen this happen a few times in the past, with Gen4, and Gen3 drives, and so on, as storage is more capable of saturating the PCIe standards much faster than hardware such as a graphics card could.

The biggest goals they’ve achieved are pretty incredible, and largely as they had to hit this level of performance while still dealing with constraints in the PCI-SIG M.2 specifications, such as the 11.55w power limit. Pushing performance up while maintaining a strict efficiency limit is never easy, but they’ve clearly done it. The drive does have a heatsink on it, no doubt to ensure the drive doesn’t throttle, and I wouldn’t dream of running a drive this fast without any form of heatsink or cooling, as it would undoubtably thermal throttle. However, a chunky heatsink and a tiny fan are all that’s needed to keep it in check and allow it to hit those blisteringly fast read and write speeds.

The performance met or exceeded our expectations, and we congratulate Phison on their efforts. Now, bring on the ultra-fast flagship drives for 2024, as there’s clearly a lot to look forward to here. For content creators, game developers, video rendering, gamers and more, these new drives are going to be pretty potent tools to get the best performance from your system. I wouldn’t expect them to be cheap, but hey, if performance is king and time is money, these are the drives you’ll want!