The high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD monopoly could be about to end: Silicon Motion’s new SSD controllers were everywhere at Computex

For several years, the market of high-performance SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface for client PCs has been dominated by solid-state drives based on the Phison PS5026-E26 controller, which has affected their pricing. Yet, this monopoly is about to end as over a dozen SSD makers demonstrated their Silicon Motion SM2508-based drives at Computex, products that are either already on the market or about to enter it.

As Silicon Motion primarily focuses on large OEMs, Micron was the first company to release a high-end SSD with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface back in February. Called the Micron 4600 and one of the best SSDs around, it's based on the SM2508 controller and Micron's own B68S 3D TLC NAND with a 3600 MT/s interface. This was an important milestone that officially placed SMI on the map with a high-end PCIe Gen5 controller and challenged the E26 dominance. But that was only one maker, albeit a very significant one. However, as of Computex 2025, Silicon Motion has made significant inroads into the high-end consumer SSD market with over a dozen partners.

The showcase revealed that companies like Adata, Crucial, Kingston, Lexar, TeamGroup Transcend, and Predator (Acer) are adopting the SM2508 controller for their next-generation Gen 5 SSDs. By partnering with a wide variety of SSD manufacturers, from top-tier players like Micron and Kingston to niche brands like Fanxiang and Ediloca, Silicon Motion can address a significant part of the market, and thus it is reasonable to expect the company to gain share of the enthusiast-grade SSD market.

The Silicon Motion SM2508 SSD controller is based on a quad-core Arm Cortex-R8 implementation and features eight NAND channels supporting an interface speed of up to 3600 MT/s per channel. On the performance side, drives based on the SM2508 are capable of delivering sequential read and write speeds of up to 14 GB/s as well as random read and write speeds of up to 2.5 million IOPS, which is in line with the capabilities of competing client SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. Meanwhile, the SM2508 is made on TSMC’s N6 (6nm-class) process technology and consumes up to 3.5W (the controller only), which reduces requirements for cooling.

These lowered requirements for cooling are quite evident, as the vast majority of SSDs that we saw at Computex do not really have fancy coolers. Of course, TeamGroup has after-market coolers for M.2 drives that are huge and are aimed at enthusiasts and professionals who need to squeeze every bit of performance out of their hardware.

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