Silicon Motion SM2504XT Gen5 Engineering Sample DRAMless SSD Preview – This May Be The Ultimate Laptop SSD

I am somewhat of a laptop nut.  Part and parcel to extensive travel for The SSD Review, my laptop has to be two things; high performing and it must have an amazing battery life.  Add to that the fact that I want a big OLED screen that I can flip, USB4 ports in something around 3 lbs and there was only one choice today, the LG Gram Pro 2-in-1 16″ Ultra Light. Would you believe this laptop is actually in the Guinness World Book of Records for the worlds lightest 16″ 2-in-1 laptop?  Check it out!

Battery life is key.  Although LG speaks to 16.5 hours average battery life, several tests have been conducted that put this laptop just under 11 hours typical office use.  Battery life is very much dependent on the SSD within, and power specs of that SSD provide an excellent indication of just that.  That is why our discovery of the Silicon Motion SM2504XT Gen 5 SSD at Flash Memory Summit last week was such a great find!  This SSD is a Gen 5 SSD capable  of speeds up to 11GB/s read and write, all the while having an active power rating of only 2.4 watts.  This is unheard of!  So much so that we had to get this SSD in hand for some truly independent testing.

Few things we all need to know about the SM2504XT before we get into our testing… This is a pre-production engineering sample that most likely hasn’t got its final firmware in place just yet.  We are not allowed to speak of the NAND flash in use, but to identify it as 3D TLC memory, and can only depict it covered up.  SMI does not release SSDs, but rather, manufactures SSD controllers and sells them to manufacturers. This controller is in the hands of their partners and will be released to the public sooner than later we might expect.  We will be the first to update this article when this occurs….and review the final consumer available product.

The Silicon Motion SM2504XT 2TB engineering sample SSD provided to us on departure from FMS has a single SM2504XT controller and 2-pieces of 3D TLC NAND flash memory situated on a blue 2280 (22mm wide x 80mm long) form factor M.2 PCB (printed circuit board)).  The SM2504XT is a PCIe 5.0 (Gen 5) four lane (x4) SSD that uses the latest NVMe 2.0 SSD protocol.  This 4-channel SSD controller is of the TSMC 6nm process, also known as the N6, which speaks to three things; performance, power efficiency and density.

Listed specifications for the SMI SM2504XT engineering sample are 11.5GB/s read and 11GB/s write throughput with up to 1700K read and 2000K write IOPS.  This Gen 5 SSD runs as high as 3600MT/s and we can state right now that our testing might surprise you as this SSD bettered many of the top tier DRAM-based SSDs available today in many of the benchmarks.  This is the exhibit provided Crystal DiskMark result from FMS:

The Silicon Motion SM2504XT is also fully MS DirectStorage compatible and was displayed with this performance as well:

Wait a minute!  Don’t leave so soon as these are only the manufacturers few performance tests.  Our testing regimen on the following pages are much more detailed and we guarantee you that there are more than a few surprises in hand!  Oh and by the way… we will be including laptop battery testing as well to demonstrate why this SSD is so special!