Phison Carves Out New SSD Brand Along With Inaugural Series
The new Pascari brand will provide SSDs for data-heavy enterprise applications.
Phison has announced a new SSD brand called Pascari, along with its first PCIe Gen5 Enterprise SSDs under the brand. As new and existing AI models continue to advance in complexity, fast and efficient storage is essential in applications ranging from workstations to data centers.
The X200 series improves performance in a familiar form factor, allowing system architects to easily increase their data throughput and transfer speeds.
This article takes a closer look at the Pascari lineup and its inaugural member, the X200 SSD. We will also put the X200 SSDs' specs in context for various applications in the age of AI.
High-Speed SSDs for Data Centers
Many modern processors are reaching their limits when training AI models such as Google Gemini, GPT4, and Copilot. While processing power is certainly a major performance metric to consider, in data centers or data-heavy applications, memory and storage are equally important for optimal throughput.
As SSDs become more available, they will play a large role in new AI techniques.
Modern applications strike a different tradeoff compared to general computing applications. While consumers or embedded designers may prefer a better price/GB, data-centric applications place more emphasis on read/write speeds, data volume density, and efficiency—all while maintaining familiar form factors. Phison’s Pascari brand of SSDs aims to strike this balance in enterprise applications to advance the age of AI, bring new performance to data centers, and improve speeds.
SSD Series Across Enterprise Applications
The first entry to the Pascari portfolio is the X200 SSD, a member of the Pascari Performance X-Series. The X200 SSDs are available in U.2 2.5” and E3.S form factors and support single- and dual-port operation. Current capacities are available up to 15.36 TB, with a planned expansion to 30.72 TB and a max power consumption of 25 W across all offerings. This series employs a 3D TLC architecture along with a PCIe 5.0 × 4 interface, yielding latencies down to 10 µs and a max sequential read speed of 14.8 GB/s.
In addition to the Performance X-Series, Phison also announced other series that will be available under the Pascari brand:
- Data Center D-Series for low-cost, high-density memory for data centers
- Boot Drive B-Series for high-reliability, high-volume rack-scale environments
- aiDAPTIV+ | AI-Series to enable custom solutions for AI research and development
Supporting Storage Needs for AI
Although many LLMs or modern AI models can run perfectly fine on consumer-grade hardware, advanced machine learning systems require more processing power and data storage. Phison's new Pascari brand reflects an understanding that data storage and access are equally important to processing in the modern computing landscape.
Phison hopes that its feature set in next-gen AI series SSDs will allow small groups to work with large models.
While the Pascari SSDs may not appear in consumer-grade devices, they could play an important role in advanced applications such as data center storage and AI training.
All images used courtesy of Phison.
