SMI SM2262EN High-Performance SSD Controller Preview
Final Thoughts & Conclusions
Over 30% of the worldwide client SSDs on the market today are powered by Silicon Motion controllers. They has design wins with a ton of big name corporations and Silicon Motion doesn’t appear to be slowing down as they have an aggressive roadmap for SSD controllers. The SM2262EN just happens to be one of those new controllers and it is impressive. The SM2262EN 2TB test drive that we were sent with Intel/Micron 63-Layer 3D TLC NAND Flash and DDR4 DRAM performed really well in our real-world performance tests and popular industry benchmark applications. The SM2262EN was at the top of the chart in our file transfer and game load time tests, so color us impressed. The fact that it beat all the other drives in the Random 4K Write benchmark and had solid Random 4K Read performance shows that Silicon Motion is making the right improvements.
The only negatives that we saw on this drive was the load power draw seemed abnormally high and there is a large performance hit when the SLC cache is filled up. That said, we are certain that SMI will better optimize the SM2262EN for power before it launches. The low sequential write speeds when the SLC cache is filled isn’t concerning on a large 2TB drive like we looked at today as not too many people are going to write over 400GB of data to an SSD without any pauses or breaks for the drive to recover. On the smaller capacity drives it will be easier to fill the SLC cache as it will be smaller, so it might be more of a concern on those drives. We’ll be sure to cover that more in-depth when we get some customer drives based on the SM2262EN controller once they arrive on the market.
We are excited to get our hands on a retail product based on the SM2262EN controller and hopefully they aren’t priced too much higher than the SM2262 powered drives as the two controllers use the same silicon. The SM2262EN supports both TLC and QLC NAND Flash memory, so it will also be interesting to see what NAND Flash is used by SMI customers on their products. SMI’s 4th generation LDPC engine is said to be ready to support next-generation QLC memory as well as the 96-layer TLC NAND Flash that is coming to market now.
The SM2262EN looks to be another promising high-performance SSD controller and will be welcomed to the market by enthusiasts thanks to the performance they offer. The game load times and file transfer speeds on this drive looks great, so we see this controller being of interest for our readers. We would like to thank Silicon Motion for allowing us to try out a 2TB reference drive before retail drives begin shipping.