Phison was first to market with a PCI-Express gen 4.0 client-segment NVMe SSD controller, the E16 series, which let it bag design wins with several DIY gaming PC SSD manufacturers. Not to be left behind by PCIe gen 4.0 controllers by its competitors, such as SMI, Marvell, Samsung, etc., offering higher performance than the E16, the company is designing a newer generation controller for high-performance client-segment SSDs, under the E18 family. TweakTown has access to early performance figures of a drive in production with this controller. The CrystalDiskMark screenshot shows the drive's sequential transfer rates to be 7381.21 MB/s reads, and 7025.86 MB/s sequential writes, making the E18 among the fastest PCIe gen 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD controllers known.