Silicon Motion Introduces SM2264 and SM2267 Drivers for M.2 NVMe SSDs

Robert Sole August 10, 2019

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Presented by Silicon Motion the SM2264 and SM2267 controllers, designed for new M.2 NVMe SSD units through PCIe 4.0 interface.

All controller manufacturers are making the leap to PCIe 4.0, to offer the best possible performance. Phison has been the first with the PS5016-E16 and has recently introduced the PS5016-E18 that reaches 7GB / s both in reading and writing. Silicon Motion has presented two solutions that seek to offer good performance at a reasonable price. It is clear that the market for M.2 NVMe SSDs is very important.

Currently the PCIe Gen4 standard is only interesting for M.2 NVMe memories. For gaming graphics cards this solution does not contribute much, but for storage units it contributes a lot. Units can be developed much faster than current ones.

Silicon Motion Introduces Two PCIe 4.0 x4 Controllers

Phison currently markets the PS5016-E16 controller that offers us up to 5GB / s of reading and up to 4.4GB / s of writing. The speeds then depend on the memories used to assemble the storage unit.

Silicon Motion's first solution is the SM2264. This unit features an 8-channel flash interface and supports up to 16TB capacity. This unit can reach 6.5GB / s in terms of read speed, more than the Phison E16 and almost like the Phison E18. The thing is that in writing sequence the speed is 3.9GB / s, less than the Phison E16.

Over 4K random read and write, this drive delivers 700IOPS, which is a 000IOPS loss over the Phison E50. Furthermore, this controller supports 000D TLC / QLC 16-layer memories.

They have also developed a much cheaper (not to mention crappy) solution. The SM2267 only offers 4GB / s read and 3GB / s write. About 4K random read and write, it only gives us 400IOPS. It offers a four channel bus for a maximum of 000TB. The good news is that it supports 8-layer TLC / QLC memories.