Marvell At The Brave New Era Of This PCIe 5.0 SSD Controller

Marvell Bravera SC5, The First PCIe 5.0 Controller

Storage is now one of the the fastest moving component in your system, and certainly the fastest evolving one.  NVMe drives have outpaced GPUs and USB when it comes to making use of PCIe 4.0 and they are now poised to move further ahead in 2022 as new platforms arrive from Intel and AMD which should support the new standard.

Marvell’s Bravera SC5 controller should be able to deliver transfer rates at an amazing 2M IOPS and 14GBps while simultaneously reducing the power draw by 40% compared to Marvell’s current offerings.  There are two controllers, the MV-SS1331 which supports 8 NAND channels and the MV-SS1333 which will support 16 channels.  The drives will also be very flexible, supporting SEF, ZNS, OCP SSD specifications thanks to a new feature Marvell has dubbed the Elastic SLA Enforcer.

Now that you are all excited comes the bad news; this will not be an M.2 drive but instead is E1.S.  This indicates that the drives are destined for use in servers, as it is quite unlikely mainstream motherboards will adopt the new standard anytime soon, though maybe the $1500 ones will.  The Bravera SC5 will be powering cloud providers like Microsoft and AWS as well as ending up in Facebook servers.  They will even be able to pick and choose the NAND they want included, as the new controller will support NAND from a wide variety of vendors with no loss of reliability, and that flexibility should help reduce costs.

Pop on over to ServeTheHome for a closer look and an amusing anecdote about the name.