Phison’s Pascari Enterprise SSDs and AI Training Solutions at FMS 2024

At FMS 2024, Phison showcased their enterprise and datacenter SSDs, PCIe retimer solutions, and consumer products. Phison, a controller and silicon vendor, has historically partnered with drive manufacturers. Their collaboration with Seagate on the X1 series (and Nytro-branded enterprise SSDs) is well-known. Seagate provided requirements and influenced firmware before qualifying drives for their datacenter customers, a resource-intensive process.

Phison had demonstrated the Gen 5 X2 platform at last year’s FMS as a continuation of the X1. However,with Seagate focusing on its Ramp and facing other battles, Phison proceeded with the X2 qualification themselves. Recognizing the limitations of white-labeling enterprise SSDs, Phison launched the Pascari brand to make their SSDs more accessible.

The Pascari brand offers different lineups for various use-cases, from high-performance X series drives to B series boot drives. The AI series supports up to 100 DWPD (drive writes per day), discussed further in the aiDAPTIVE+ section.

The D200V Gen 5 SSD leads with a 61.44 TB capacity (a 122.88 TB version is planned). Using QLC NAND in this capacity-focused line reduces sustained sequential write speeds to 2.1 GBps,suitable for read-heavy workloads.

The X200,a Gen 5 eTLC drive,boasts up to 8.7 GBps sequential writes. It’s available in read-centric (1 DWPD) and mixed workload (3 DWPD) variants up to 30.72 TB. The X100 eTLC drive is an evolution of the X1 / Seagate Nytro 5050 platform, with newer NAND and larger capacities.

These drives include enterprise features like power-loss protection and FIPS certifiability. Future firmware updates may include NVMe features like flexible data placement.

100 GBps with Dual highpoint Rocket 1608 Cards and Phison E26 SSDs

Phison demonstrated 100 gbps+ sequential reads and writes using a desktop workstation with two HighPoint Rocket 1608A add-in cards (each with eight M.2 slots) and 16 M.2 drives in RAID 0.

HighPoint Technology and Phison are qualifying E26-based drives for this use-case, with more details to come in a future review.

aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite for AI Training

Phison’s aiDAPTIV+ Pro suite was a notable exhibition. After showcasing a 40 DWPD SSD for Chia last year, they’ve focused on extreme endurance, reaching 60 DWPD (standard for SLC-based cache drives from Micron and Solidigm).

At FMS 2024, Phison added a middleware layer to this SSD to ensure more sequential workloads, increasing endurance to 100 DWPD. This middleware is part of their AI training suite for small and medium enterprises lacking the budget for a DGX workstation or on-premises fine-tuning.

Re-training models using these AI SSDs as an extension of GPU VRAM can provide TCO benefits, replacing costly AI training GPUs with lower-cost RTX GPUs. The middleware is licensed with the AI-series SSDs (currently Gen 4 x4 in U.2 or M.2 form-factors). Using SSDs as a caching layer enables fine-tuning models with many parameters using fewer GPUs, reducing reliance on their HBM capacity.