Phison E18

The Phison E18 (PS5018-E18) is an 8-channel PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe controller released in 2020, built on TSMC's 12nm FinFET process. It uses a dual-core ARM Cortex-R5 CPU and supports DRAM cache. The E18 became the dominant PCIe 4.0 controller for brands without in-house designs, and was used in a wide range of drives from Seagate, Kingston, Crucial, Corsair, Sabrent, and others.

Sequential performance on E18-based drives typically reaches 7,000–7,400 MB/s read and up to 7,000 MB/s write, close to the PCIe 4.0 x4 bandwidth ceiling. Random IOPS reaches approximately 1,000K read and 1,000K write on 1TB-class drives. It supports hardware AES-256 encryption, TCG Opal 2.0, and multiple NVMe power states.

Notable drives using the E18 include the Seagate FireCuda 530, Kingston Fury Renegade, Kingston KC3000, Crucial P5 Plus, and Crucial T500.