FADU SSD controller with PCIe 5.0: 3.4 million IOPS and 15 GB/s

The young start-up company FADU wants to play at the top in the field of SSD controllers for server applications from now on. With the new 16-channel FC5161 controller with PCIe 5.0 connection, they want to achieve absolute top values. SSDs equipped with it should be able to achieve up to 3.4 million IOPS and a speed of 14.6 GB/s during reading.

FADU SSD controller with PCIe 5.0 introduced

After the PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 solutions, the South Korean manufacturer FADU Technology offers the SSD controller FC5161, the first model with PCIe 5.0 connection including firmware. The SSDs equipped with it are primarily aimed at business customers such as OEMs, where they want to outperform the top dogs such as Phison or Silicon Motion.

During the Open Compute Global Summit, FADU officially introduced its new SSD controller. Corresponding designs are called Echo and are to be offered in the new E1.S, E3, E1.L server SSD form factors as well as in the 2.5-inch U.2 format.

The FC5161 controller, which supports PCIe 5.0 x4 and NVMe 1.4a as well as OCP Cloud Spec 2.0, is particularly exciting. The heart of the SSDs offers a whole 16 NAND channels and can already work with the NAND interface ONFi 5 with transfer rates of 2,400 MT/s. However, such a fast NAND flash is currently not yet available, so the focus is primarily on future viability.

Impressive speed

With this combination, the Echo SSDs with FADU controller are said to achieve speeds of 14.6 GB/s for sequential read and up to 10.4 GB/s for sequential write. In random read, 3.4 million IOPS are said to be possible – that would be a new peak value for PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

However, the SSD only achieves 735,000 IOPS in random write, which does not sound like much at first. It will be exciting to see what performance the Echo SSD can ultimately provide under permanent load. SSDs with NAND flash sooner or later collapse strongly under high workloads.

Power consumption and heat dissipation

Thanks to the interface’s data transfer rate, which has been doubled again with PCIe 5.0 compared to PCIe 4.0, twice as high SSD performance should also be possible, at least in theory. However, at the expense of higher power consumption and the resulting additional waste heat.

According to FADU Technology, the aspect of energy efficiency should not have been neglected either. Less than 5.2 watts in average use (Average Power) are mentioned. The manufacturer does not reveal details about the application scenario and the maximum power consumption or heat dissipation TDP in the announcement.

In the past months, Marvell Bravera and Kioxia also announced corresponding SSD controllers according to the PCIe 5.0 standard, which are supposed to enable very similar speeds.