addlink S95, Eyes On A New Phison SSD

More PCIe 4.0 NVMe Goodness

As a long time partner with Phison, addlink hasn’t grabbed a large share of the market but they are still a player in the market.  They have recently released 1TB and 2TB S95 M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs using Phison’s PS5018-E18 controller with a DDR4 cache and Micron 96 layer TLC flash.  They come with a five year warranty, the 1TB drive is rated for 700 TBW while the 2TB drive will survive up to 1400 TBW.   Currently, they are selling for $227 and $445 respectively, which is a bit high but still competitive.

Tweaktown fired it up on a system with a Ryzen 9 5900X living on a ASUS ROG Crosshair Hero VIII Wi-Fi and were more than impressed with the drive.  It produced over 7GB/s sequential throughput in CrystalDiskMArk, an 11K total score in AS SSD, not to mention the best ATTO sequential write speeds at 6776.

Interestingly the reason that this drive didn’t top the charts is the random reads, where it was actually noticeably slower than the competition.  If you have a workload which requires a lot of writes and sequential reads, then this review of the addlink S95 is for you.