The Inland Performance Plus 2TB SSD Review: Phison's E18 NVMe Controller Tested

Conclusion

With drives like the Inland Performance Plus, Phison's E18 controller has kept them in competition for the consumer SSD performance crown. The Inland Performance Plus is an extremely fast drive that sets a few new performance records, but more often it ends up tied or slightly slower than a competing PCIe 4.0 flagship SSD. The difference between this drive and other top PCIe 4.0 drives like the WD Black SN850 would not be noticeable during real-world usage, so the question of which one is fastest is more about bragging rights than tangible benefits.

Phison is the only company already on their second generation of PCIe 4.0 controllers, but they still have some room for improvement. The Inland Performance Plus consistently had high power consumption and poor efficiency during our testing. It's not completely out of line for a high-end drive that needs to prioritize performance over power efficiency, but the bar is being raised by the in-house controllers from several of the major NAND manufacturers. A second round of Phison E18-based products will be coming to market soon using Micron's 176L TLC rather than the current 96L TLC, and that should enable slightly improved performance and power efficiency. It might be enough to bump the new E18 drives into first place on more performance tests, and will definitely help keep this market segment highly competitive.

Our most difficult (and least realistic) tests revealed that the Inland Performance Plus and the Phison E18 controller and firmware also have some difficulties with performance consistency, for random read latency and for write performance where the SLC caching behavior occasionally leaves something to be desired. These aren't serious performance problems, but they are blemishes that we would prefer not to have on top-tier products. Firmware improvements may be able to help these issues, but a lot of the brands selling Phison drives aren't very good about making firmware updates available to end users.

Micro Center's in store only pricing for the Inland Performance Plus makes it the cheapest Phison E18 drive on the market, though Sabrent's more widely available Rocket 4 Plus is only $10 more for the 1TB model. With the exception of the Inland, most of the E18 drives seem to be priced at or above where the other second-wave PCIe 4.0 flagships are. The cheapest of the new PCIe 4.0 flagships is ADATA's Gammix S70 using Innogrit's controller. The older Phison E16 drives with TLC NAND are starting to get harder to find, but some such as the Sabrent Rocket 4.0 are a good mid-point between the latest top of the line drives and mainstream PCIe 3.0 drives.

For consumers with access to Micro Center's in-store pricing, the Inland Performance Plus is a reasonable choice since it's a bit cheaper than the flagships from Samsung and WD—but keep in mind that Micro Center is only offering a three year warranty rather than the usual five. For everyone else who has to deal with the online prices on other brands' Phison E18 drives, going for the WD Black SN850 instead makes more sense, especially for the 2TB models. The WD Black has more consistent performance and substantially less heat output.

However, all of the high-end PCIe 4.0 drives still carry a very steep price premium over even the best PCIe 3.0 drives. Recent increases in retail SSD prices have affected mainstream models more than the premium PCIe 4.0 drives, but the price gap is going to remain pretty wide. Those more mainstream models still provide almost as much real-world performance and a wider range of capacity options. Until a more compelling use case for PCIe 4.0 performance shows up, saving $50-100 by sticking with PCIe 3.0 storage seems like a great way to deal with high prices on other PC components.