The Chinese have created an SSD on their own flash memory, which is not inferior in speed to the world’s best analogues

The Chinese have learned to make SSDs using their own memory, which are not inferior to products from the world’s largest manufacturers. The Chinese Zhitai TiPro9000 drive with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface, an unmarked controller and fifth-generation YMTC 3D NAND chips based on Xtacking 4.0 architecture showed in a review of the DIY.Zol.com.cn resource a read speed of up to 14.5 GB/s – at the level of the best models on market.

Image source: diy.zol.com.cn

The Zhitai TiPro9000 drive with a capacity of 2 TB has on board two fifth-generation YMTC 3D TLC NAND chips based on Xtacking 4.0 architecture, which involves a 128- or 232-layer layout and a high-speed interface. There is a DRAM chip – LPDDR4X with a capacity of 2 GB. The controller on the SSD is unmarked, but the aluminum heatsink and power circuit indicate a Silicon Motion SM2508, and the controller developer confirmed this.

In tests, the Zhitai TiPro9000 achieved a sequential read speed of 14,527 MB/s, which is slightly lower than the reference SM2508-based drive; sequential write speed is 13,869 MB/s, and this is already higher than the standard on the SM2508. The maximum speed was maintained, of course, only when the SLC cache was running, which in the case of the TiPro9000 was enough for about 24 seconds – after this time, the speed dropped to about 4000 MB/s and remained that way for another 325 seconds. Then the speed began to fluctuate between 1700 and 1800 MB/s, and after 259 seconds it returned to 4000 MB/s. Zhitai points out that this SSD has random read and write speeds of up to 2 million and 1.6 million IOPS, respectively.

Overall, the Zhitai TiPro9000’s results are more or less in line with the best PCIe 5.0 x4 drives, which is to be expected given the availability of the SM2508 controller for advanced consumer SSDs. YMTC 3D NAND chips also made their contribution, of course. The manufacturer provides a five-year warranty for this model and promises a resource of 1200 TBW (terabytes of overwritten information). The cost of Zhitai TiPro9000 is not specified.