Why would you buy this? Orico E5000 1TB Gen4 NVMe SSD Review

This is the Orico E5000, a PCIe Gen4 SSD that I just can’t work out why you’d actually buy it. Let’s look at it then we’ll discuss purchasability – this is the 1TB version, although it comes in 512GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB varieties. It isn’t a full-fat PCIe Gen4 drive though, with a claimed peak of 5.2GB/s on reads and 4.5GB/s on writes. A full fat drive should be able to hit more like 7GB/s. This 1TB one is actually down-rated to 5.1GB/s reads and 3.9GB/s writes, although we’re gonna test that! Oh and while we’re talking specs, this has a claimed terabyte written rating of 300TBW, and a multiple of that for the various drive sizes. 

The drive itself claims to have a “graphene heatsink”, which is a funny way to say insulating sticker, but is otherwise a single sided 2280 sized drive. Beneath the sticker you’ll find an RTS5772DL Realtek NVMe 1.4 DRAMless controller – not the full fat NVMe 2.0 spec – which itself apparently caps out at 6GB/s with the best config of NAND possible, which this.. Well it isn’t. The four NAND flash packages you’ll find below the controller are Intel QLC 256GB packages. I have to assume the 2TB and 4TB versions use different packages – likely 512GB and 1TB packages instead of 256GB, although based on the performance claims I’d be inclined to believe they are still QLC packages. Between the QLC NAND and the complete lack of a DRAM cache – something this controller doesn’t even support if you wanted to – you can expect performance to be a bit of a mixed bag. Let’s see just how mixed that bag is…

Starting off with Crystal Disk Mark, which usually shows the absolute best performance a drive can reasonably offer, and yeah, yikes. The E5000 is the slowest Gen4 drive I’ve ever tested, with 4.6GB/s in reads, and an appalling 2.8GB/s in writes – with the best case 1 thread and a queue depth of 8. With a queue depth of 1 it’s slower, matching the Rocket 4 Pluses pretty naff performance at 3.5GB/s in reads, although it’s offering Gen3 drive speeds on writes at 2.5GB/s. With a random 4K block size, queue depth of 32 and 1 thread it isn’t quite as bad, actually playing with the big boys at 500MB/s writes and 785MB/s reads, although if you drop the queue size down to one, well any advantage this might have had is gone, offering the slowest reads at 69MB/s (nice), and 245MB/s writes too. 

AS SSD has the E5000 basically matching Gen3 drives for writes, and tying the slowest (and oldest) crop of Gen4 drives I’ve tested for reads at 2.7GB/s and 4.1GB/s respectively. Considering even the tiny DRAMless Crucial P310 is up at 5.5GB/s reads and writes, this isn’t a space or even a straight DRAM problem, it’s a controller and NAND problem. Random 4K blocks do a little better, at least on writes, putting the E5000 somewhere in the middle of the pack at 250MB/s, although the reads have it still tied with the Gen3 drives. 

As for ATTO, well I’ve got the E5000 in the green lines, and as you can see on the writes front it’s getting awfully close to the Samsung 970 EVO, a solidly Gen3 drive, with only the reads being near to the 5GB/s rate – although even then there is quite a big problem with the data here. Most drives peak at the 64KB block size, but this takes until 512KB to hit its peak, and it offers frankly terrible performance at the 4KB block size – considerably slower than basically anything else I’ve tested, Gen3 or Gen4. That’s not exactly great.

As for actually transferring data – well even just loading up the drive with my usual large file dataset uncovered an interesting problem. That insulating sticker – sorry ‘graphene heatsink’ – meant that even just copying data to the drive made it overheat. The drive peaked at 85°c, which is way too hot for an SSD. The SMART temperature limit is 75°c before it should start thermal throttling, so 85°c is madness. Applying an actual heatsink is clearly necessary here, and I can confirm it helps an awful lot. Actually writing from a faster drive was ok at 2.5GB/s, despite the intense heat, although my usual file duplication stress test revealed the other problem with a DRAMless QLC drive. While initially it copied somewhat quickly, around 1.3GB/s which isn’t bad for this sort of file duplication which stresses the controllers reads and writes simultaneously, as soon as it runs out of SLC cache – basically just only using one of the four layers per cell – it reverts to the NAND’s raw performance, and my god this NAND is slow. It spent most of its time at around 100MB/s – that’s mechanical hard drive speeds – with occasional bursts to 300MB/s – which is SATA 2 SSD speeds – which isn’t exactly stellar performance. Now technically this only happens when you’ve either copied a lot of data at once or filled the drive up, although if you plan on using this as your primary storage drive then it’s going to fill up pretty quickly and then it’s going to be glacially slow. 

I think that brings us nicely back to my initial question – why would you ever buy this when there are endless other options on the market, all for basically the same price, which if nothing else are from name-brands, and at best can perform significantly better? If this was like £10 cheaper than the Crucial P3 Plus, an equally mid-tier Gen4 drive, then mmmamyyybbbbeee I could understand, but it isn’t. It’s the same price. Hell Kingston will sell you their NV3 drive – with the same sort of claimed performance – for just £45, £15 less than the P3 Plus or the E5000. That’s the sort of price this thing should be – if not lower – to make it a worthwhile choice, especially for the sort of performance I’ve seen here. So, if you’ve got £60 to spend on a mid-tier Gen4 SSD, get the P3 Plus, or save £15 and get the NV3, and skip this one.