Chinese PC Hardware Company UNIS Unveils Disruptive New M.2 Gen 5 NVMe SSD

UNIS, a subsidiary of Tsinghua Unigroup, has introduced a new consumer M.2 Gen 5 NVMe SSD that has the potential to challenge the fastest drives in its category. The UNIS S5 is designed in the M.2-2280 form factor and features a PCI-Express 5.0 x4 host interface. With a maximum sequential read speed of 14.9 GB/s, the company claims it surpasses current M.2 Gen 5 NVMe SSDs in the client segment. What sets this drive apart from its Western competitors is the fact that it is DRAMless.

The UNIS S5 comes equipped with a first-party SSD controller utilizing HMB (host memory buffer) technology. In addition to its impressive 14.9 GB/s maximum read speeds, the drive offers a maximum sequential write speed of 12.9 GB/s, one of the highest in the industry. It also boasts 4K random access performance of up to 1.8 million IOPS reads and up to 1.7 million IOPS writes. These performance metrics position the UNIS S5 as significantly faster than any other DRAMless Gen 5 SSD on the market, outperforming even the fastest drives with around 12 GB/s sequential transfer speeds and those based on a DRAM-cached controller platform.

For comparison, the recently released Samsung 9100 PRO offers up to 14.8 GB/s sequential reads but with higher sequential write speeds of up to 13.4 GB/s. The image below showcases the UNIS S5 Ultra, the company's flagship drive featuring a proprietary DRAM-cached controller.