New Flagship Melds Micron 232L 3D TLC and Phison E25

Essential is unveiling its newest addition to its Gen4 client NVMe SSD lineup immediately – the T500 PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 NVMe SSD. It takes over flagship duties from the Essential P5 Plus on this class. The corporate had began to place concentrate on the high-end client SSD section earlier this 12 months with the launch of the T700 Gen5 NVMe SSD – it was one of many first to supply greater than 12 GBps learn speeds. The corporate is now introducing a T-series drive within the Gen4 section with related flagship credentials – sequential learn and write speeds of 7400 / 7000 MBps.

The Essential T500 is without doubt one of the first client SSDs to make the most of the Phison E25 controller launched final 12 months. The Micron 232L 3D TLC NAND within the SSD has been in mass manufacturing for just a few quarters now, permitting the corporate to cost the product competitively. Much like the T700, this drive is focused in direction of avid gamers, content material creators, {and professional} customers. Whereas PCIe 5.0 SSDs are slowly getting launched into the market, Gen4 items are nonetheless a candy spot when it comes to system compatibility, value, and efficiency for a lot of use-cases.

The T500 is launching in three capacities and two variants – a heatsink and non-heatsink one. The 500GB model is available in a non-heatsink SKU solely, whereas the 1TB and 2TB ones are available each variants. Essential is promising a 4TB model subsequent 12 months. The corporate indicated that the heatsink SKUs is low-profile sufficient to be be used within the PlayStation 5.

Phison has been pushing DirectStorage optimizations in its high-end controllers, and it’s no shock that the T500 advertises using Phison’s ‘I/O+ Expertise’ to attraction to avid gamers. Given its high-performance nature, it’s no shock that the E25 controller must be outfitted with DRAM for managing the flash translation layer (FTL). Essential is utilizing Micron LPDDR4 DRAM (1GB / TB of flash) within the T500 for this objective.

Flash pricing is kind of low, with the reminiscence business being caught up in one among its downturns at present. Whereas this has not been sort to the income numbers for the NAND flash / DRAM distributors, it has translated to glorious launch pricing for even flagship SSDs such because the Essential T500 – ranging from as little as 8.5¢/GB for the 2TB non-heatsink SKU.