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It is funny how things work out sometimes. While at Computex in Taipei a few weeks back, we were introduced to Frank Chen, CEO of Exascend, through our contacts at SMI. Frank laid out their company values and explained key reasoning for their success which is their ability to customize and cater to their customers needs in a shorter time span than larger companies. We were very surprised to learn Frank’s background trails right back to where we got a start with SandForce several years ago, having been the China General Manager back in 2011. No sooner did our meeting end than Frank had arranged for a quick tour of their facility in Shanghai a few days later. And we were off.
Once in Shanghai we were contacted my Sean Xiong who was the host of a great office tour. Truth be told their original plan was to have Karen and I on the bullet train to visit their production facility just over 830km away but we weren’t so certain we had the time for that. We were then told that the high-speed train to Wuhan from Shanghai reached speeds of 350KM/s and cut the travel time down to 3.5 hrs each way. Definitely an experience we shouldn’t have second guessed I might think!
We were introduced to the Shanghai Exascend engineering team and spoke a bit more of their core values where we learned a definite asset in their SSD production was that Exascend builds their products right from the wafer level. This cuts down on lead times to the customer significantly.
Something I found very impressive was their positive company attitudes which tied right in to quotes found throughout the office. ‘Inspiration to Innovation’ and ‘Innovation Starts Here’ were two of the most noteable. No sooner were we being shown around the office than our discussion moved over to enterprise SSDs and their PD5 Enterprise SSD.
The Exascend PD5 Series Enterprise SSD is based on the SMI SM8366 Gen 5 SSD controller (hence our connection between the two companies), and available in capacities from 7680 to 30720GB. It uses 3D TLC NAND as well as DDR4 DRAM, has performance specs of 14,100MB/s read and 9,335MB/s write with up to 3112K IOPS.
Power efficiency for this SSD runs from 5.4W idle all the way up to 25W active and we were again reminded that, because they did their own manufacturing, customization could fine tune the end product to the customers needs as they also specialize in firmware customization.
Of interest in the lab was this SSD test chamber where SSDs can be tested in different environmental conditions. Temperatures of such equipment can reach 85C internally and temperatures can fluctuate from very high to very low in quick succession in order to detect physical weaknesses, soldering faults or component degradation.
After the office tour, Sean and the team were kind enough to offer us a taste of local cuisine. A big thanks to Frank, Sean and the team and stay tuned as you just may see an Exascend Enterprise SSD review posted sometime in the near future.
