Phison's PCIe Gen6 SSD controller is here, delivering incredible 28 GB/s speeds

Although PCIe Gen5 SSDs still feel like they're coming into their own, at Phison's Computex 2026 booth, we were given a friendly reminder that PCIe Gen6 was right around the corner. The company's in-house developed PCIe Gen6 controller, the X3, is built for enterprise first (naturally), but it's set to deliver a 2X performance increase over PCIe Gen5.

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And that covers all of the most important specs. Sequential read and write speeds for the Phison X3 reach an incredible 28 GB/s, which is double the 14 GB/s speed of Gen5 SSDs and controllers. Not only that, but Random Read and Random Write (IOPS) both hit 6,800K, which is again, double what Gen5 delivers.

And this even extends to power efficiency, which Phison measures in MB/s per watt. Here the PCIe Gen6 X3 delivers 4,000 MB/s per watt compared to Gen5's 2,000 MB/s. Again, that's double. For the data center and AI factory markets, a 2X increase is a game-changer, with Phison noting that X3-powered SSDs will be available in capacities up to 2PB. That's 2 Petabytes. Yeah, remarkable.

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And with that, the controller was on show at Computex 2026 in two PASCARI reference designs, which is Phison's enterprise storage brand. We got to see two samples in the popular E3.S and E1.S form factors. For desktop and laptop users, this is also a little teaser for what's around the corner: SSD speeds closer to 30GB/s, which feels like an endgame scenario, even though Gen7 and Gen8 are coming at some point in the future.

Phison told us it will sample its X3 Gen6 SSD controller to partners later this year.