PCIe Gen 4 SSDs – Aorus 2TB Gen4 M.2 Review
You’ve likely heard a lot about PCIe Gen 4 in the last couple days, how it’s both amazing and brilliant to see, but also pointless right now. Now, I agree with both of those statements, with one exception, SSDs. Specifically, Gen 4 NVME SSDs like this absolute unit of an M.2 drive. This is the Gigabyte Aorus Gen 4 M.2 SSD.
So some headline stats, it can read at over 5GB/s and write at around 4.2GB/s. It comes with a massive 70 gram chunk of copper to keep it cool, uses a Phison E16 controller and is pricey, at around $500 for the 2TB version.
On the note of price, while it is definitely an expensive drive, it’s actually almost the same price as Samsung’s 970 EVO 2TB drive, but around double the speed, and of course the 1TB and soon to be released 500GB models will be a good bit cheaper too.
So, performance. This thing is insane. In the synthetic tests, this smashes everything. You see 5GB/s reads across the board here, with around 4.2GB/s writes making this a very impressive drive. Even with a queue depth of 4 on ATTO you are still seeing around 4.7GB/s reads on anything above 256KB.
In my usual “real world” test, more like a torture test for the drive, it aced that too. The test is copying the GTA V game files to the drive, then duplicating them on it to stress both reads and writes, and get the most out of the controller, and this drive beat anything I’ve seen by nearly 50%. The drive happily sat at around 1.5GB/s almost constantly, without dropping speed almost at all. The drive only has 2GB of DDR4 Cache, although I’m not sure about buffer, but did a good job of flushing that cache quick enough to not affect performance at all.
It also seemed to do well at keeping cool, if nothing else thanks to that massive copper heatsink it has, as it didn’t hit the usual 70°c thermal throttling point some drives do, although it got close after a few stress tests at around 67°c. I’d imagine if you had an already hot system and were writing a lot to the drive, even with the heatsink you might see some performance loss.
And in case anyone was worried about being able to fill the drive in under 7 minutes, and it wearing out on them, gigabyte listed 3.6PBW as their warranty limit, so you should be good.
Overall then, PCIe Gen 4, from a graphics card perspective, is currently a bit of a marketing gimmick – one that might hurt your wallet should you buy an X570 motherboard – but from an SSD perspective, it’s damn fast, and very, very impressive – plus hypothetically 5GB/s isn’t even the limit for the connection, it should be closer to 6GB/s – but whether you actually need any of this speed is a very different question.
Want one? Amazon: https://techteamgb.co.uk/aorusgenm2
M.2 NVMe SSDs are already crazy fast, but the new PCIe Gen 4.0 SSDs, like this Gigabyte/Aorus one, are off the wall fast. Here’s a quick review!
Products shown provided by: AMD
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