Zotac displayed an upcoming add-in card (AIC) SSD at CES 2016 but didn’t reveal a product name until today. We just received word that the new NVMe-based drive will sell as the SONIX.
SONIX is an interesting entry to the SSD market for a number of reasons. This looks to be the first drive based on Phison’s PS5007-E7 controller that we’ve talked about for nearly a year now. The E7 uses the NVMe protocol like Intel’s SSD 750 and Samsung’s 950 Pro/SM951-NVMe SSDs. By using the add-in card form factor, Zotac doesn’t have to stick to the very low power limits that restrict M.2 form factor SSDs. The form factor also allows Zotac to cool the E7 controller with a heatsink, something the PCI-SIG didn’t include space for in the M.2 specifications.
| Product | Zotac SONIX |
|---|---|
| Form Factor | Add-in Card |
| Interface | NVMe 1.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 |
| Controller | Phison PS5007-E7 |
| DRAM | 512MB DDR3 |
| Flash | Toshiba 15nm MLC 3,000 P/E Cycle |
| Capacity | 480GB |
| Sequential Read | Up to 2,600 MB/s |
| Sequential Write | Up to 1,300 MB/s |
| Endurance | 698 TBW |
| MTBF | 2,000,000 Hours
|
Zotac calls the SONIX “The Silent Silver Bullet.” SSDs are silent, and the NVMe protocol is the fastest interface for non-volatile memory to date. The drive compares well on paper to both of Samsung’s NVMe-based SSDs and even Intel’s consumer-focused SSD 750 built with an enterprise controller. Zotac did not release any random data performance numbers. The E7 last has strong random performance which puts the M.2 model in with the best consumer SSDs ever released. Random performance and performance consistency have been a high priority for Phison over the last year, so we expect to see an improvement over our previous tests with the retail products.
The increase may come in the form of an optimized NVMe driver. Both Intel and Samsung released NVMe protocol drives with SSD specific drivers that increased performance over the Microsoft driver. Phison does spec the E7 at 350,000 random read IOPS and 250,000 random write IOPS.
