Wendell in this video, said that he was getting around 30 minutes of extra battery life just by swapping his NVMe drive to the engineering sample Phison E28. Does anyone know if this controller has made it to mass market yet?
In the past Wendell had recommended the Solidigm NVMe drives, but they have pulled out of the consumer NVMe space, focusing on their datacenter products.
SK Hynix’s P41 seems to be the direct 1:1 for the Solidigm drive. But I can’t seem to find a Phison E28 controller NVMe drive anywhere at the moment. At least it’s not easy to find with my Google-Fu.
I’m looking for both my System76 Galp7 as well as it’s incoming replacement the Framework 16.
I have an average-spec Crucial T700 on a desktop and recently got a Samsung 9100 Pro on another desktop, the latter appears (reading reviews/specs) to have top notch perf, power efficiency at least on paper so you could look at that model too? It has a custom (in house) controller called Presto.
I can’t think of any are and there are none in TechPowerUp’s database. If you’re determined to use Phision and PCIe 5 it’d be E31T but, realistically, if any E28s happen and they end up outperforming SM2508, it’s likely to be by a small margin. Both are on TSMC N6. Presto’s on Samsung 5 nm but somewhat less efficient in some senses than SM2508 drives.
For idle and battery life a lot of it’s about how the drive behaves with ASPM, anyways, which seems pretty YMMV with conflicting results and varying drive behavior. Attempting to optimize this through controller selection isn’t especially likely to be successful, particularly as most data I’m aware of suggests for earlier PCIe generations. For a current gen drive capable of low idle maybe try NM790. But be careful of the variant.