PCIe 5.0 Controllers For Enterprise, Extreme Bandwidth And Affordable Performance
Phison is showing off their chops at CES 2026, detailing several new PCIe 5.0 controllers and, you guessed it, new AI acceleration technology. We will get the AI over with first, as Phison has come up with something interesting that may have wider utility than just AI workloads during our current DDR5 nightmare. aiDAPTIV+ is a way to process LLM jobs making use of onboard integrated GPUs and the cache in a Phison SSD, reducing the amount of RAM required for processing. Their in-house tests show that “a 120B MoE parameter can now be handled with 32GB of DRAM in contrast to the 96GB required in traditional approaches.”
While we may not be overly interested in the performance of LLM performance, we can hope that aiDAPTIV+ could also be used to offload some of the work your RAM does when gaming to a purpose built Phison SSD. With the price of DDR5 skyrocketing, this might mean a gaming system could make due with less RAM while still offering decent gaming performance. This is not something Phison has shown off, but it could breath new life into systems built with an iGPU, or even help a system with a discrete card that has 8GB of VRAM.
We’ve already seen the flagship Phison E28 controller in the reference SSDs shipped out to some review sites like The SSD Review and it is the best of the best. We haven’t seen the new E37T PCIe 5.0 controller before today, but will certainly start seeing it in OEM desktops and laptops. It is designed to use less power than the E28 and as it lacks a DRAM cache it will also be far more affordable. That doesn’t mean you lose out on performance, with Phison suggesting you can expect to see it hit 14.7 GB/s sequential reads and 13.0 GB/s sequential writes, or up to 2,000K 4KB random IOPS if you prefer that measurement.
Last up are the Pascari X201 and D201 Gen5 Enterprise SSDs, which might help you convince your boss that your server does indeed need an upgrade. The Pascari X201 is the AI training, analytics, high-frequency trading and HPC solution and is rated for 60 Drive Writes Per Day which suggests an incredible resilience to heavy usage. The D201 is built for the cloud, the 122.88TB drive offers 14,700 MB/s sequential reads and 3,000K IOPS random reads so not only do you get vast amounts of storage, your clients can get their data at speeds that weren’t possible before.
Keep an eye out for reviews of the E37T PCIe 5.0 controller in 2026, as it could make PCIe 5.0 much more obtainable for everyone.
