Truly Made In China SSD – Orico IG740-Pro 2TB Review

For the first time in my SSD reviewing career, I have a drive in front of me that is entirely made by China. This is the Orico IG740-Pro, a ‘full fat’ PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD, and in this video we’re going to take a look at it, put it through its paces, and see if it’s worth buying over the western options (although let’s be real they aren’t really ‘western’, as they are almost all made in the eastern hemisphere too, but by western companies). First, a tour. This isn’t the first Orico drive I’ve tested, that would be the E5000, a more mid-tier Gen 4 drive that just doesn’t make much sense in terms of performance, but unlike that one this does come with a heatsink in the box. It’s just a thin bit of folded sheet metal, with a spare thermal pad included for good measure in the box alongside a screwdriver (it even has a spinny base for easier use) and a screw that will work with precisely one motherboard (and good luck finding out which…). The heatsink isn’t really worth installing unless your motherboard doesn’t have one of its own. If it doesn’t, you’ll want to use this, because this thing gets toasty. Even by Orico’s measurements you are looking at a hefty (and thermally throttled) temp, so yeah this needs cooling one way or another. This heatsink won’t do that much though, other than really just act as a heat-soaker.

The drive itself is a single sided 2280 form factor, and a peek under the sticker reveals the magic. This is a DRAMless drive, but the unique part here is that the controller, a Musray Maxio MAP1602 (from mid 2023), AND the flash, made by the Yangtze Memory Technology Company, are both made by, and to my knowledge, in China. And just to top it off, at least as of writing you can only buy this from Aliexpress. A true China special. That controller is pretty much in line with the other NVMe 2.0 controllers, claiming 7.4GB/s on reads and 6.5GB/s on writes, although doesn’t even have the option of a DRAM cache. They claim SLC-like burst performance – that’s the 6.5GB/s figure – and also direct to TLC write for “great sustain performance”. We’re gonna test that! As for the NAND flash, that’s YMTC’s Xtacking 3.0 3D TLC flash from 2022 – so nothing here is super new, and to be fair people like Lexar with their NM790 drive have the same setup, so it isn’t exactly unique, but it is the first time I’ve seen it, so let’s take a look at the performance.

First up, the synthetic benchmarks. Crystal Disk Mark normally shows us the best case scenario results, and here we get a hair under 7.1GB/s and 6GB/s reads and writes respectively. That’s 300MB/s lower than claimed on reads and 500MB/s on writes – although to be fair that’s still pretty typical, and at least on read performance it is up there with some of the better drives on the market. Write performance isn’t as strong, although it is still on par with some full fat Gen 4 drives. Interestingly, with a lower queue depth the IG740 actually climbs in the charts with balanced read and write performance. Considering something like the Crucial P310 (the 2230 version, not that it matters) offers better write performance but worse read performance, I’d call that even. With random 4 kilobyte blocks and a queue depth of 32 you’ll find the IG740 topping my charts here with over 1GB/s in reads and nearly 900MB/s in writes – over 100MB/s faster than the fastest drive I’ve tested so far. Not bad, huh? Lastly for Crystal Disk Mark, the same block size but with a queue depth of one, the IG740 drops back to the middle of the pack with a very respectable result. It’s shaping up to be a remarkably decent drive despite the lack of a DRAM cache!

AS SSD has a similar top end set of results, with the IG740 sitting at 5.2GB/s in writes and 5.6GB/s in reads. AS SSD is always slower compared to Crystal Disk Mark, so those numbers make sense. It also makes sense in the standings, albeit a little slower than the other NVMe 2.0 drives I’ve tested. With a random 4K block size again we see the IG740’s strength, coming in second on writes, although the reads aren’t quite as strong. Still, a good result. The same test but with 64 threads shows the complete opposite picture, with the IG740 offering the second-to-slowest performance I’ve seen – only falling behind its Orico sibling, the E5000. The Sabrent drives offer almost double the write performance, and the read performance isn’t much better. Some drives are almost a gigabyte per second faster. 

ATTO offers us a look at what performance from each block size from 512B to 64MB looks like, and while the read performance at the top end does match the fastest drives I’ve tested, the strange dip at 64KB, 128KB and 256KB is, well, strange. The write performance is also the most unstable I’ve tested, although at least it’s worlds better than the E5000 with its frankly terrible read performance! 

As for real world file transfers, copying from the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus G, we get a respectable 3GB/s or so on average. That isn’t the fastest I’ve seen, the Crucial P310 (also a DRAMless drive) copied at almost 4.5GB/s from the same source, but 3GB isn’t bad for sure. Duplicating those files though I think is the fastest I’ve seen at around 2.5GB/s on average – at least initially. Copying around 100GB sets gives us a good way to see how performance drops once the SLC cache has been filled up – and at what point that happens. It turns out around 500GB or so is the limit for this one. That isn’t bad, although that means performance is likely to drop off the more you use the drive. The bare NAND performance here is also somewhat problematic. As soon as the cache space ran out, it drops to running at anywhere between 2MB/s and 200MB/s. This is really pretty terrible performance – this is slower than a mechanical hard drive at these speeds, and for good measure I duplicated again to see what it’d do – and for almost a minute it sat at 0MB/s which HWInfo reported 100% write activity. I genuinely thought I’d found out the capacity was fake here, but happily it did continue – at 2-200MB/s max though. That’s not exactly ideal. For context, when the Crucial P310 ran out of SLC cache it was anywhere from 30MB/s to 750MB/s, with most of the performance at 300MB/s or higher. While that still isn’t exactly the advertised 6 or 7 GB/s, it’s still considerably better than this IG740.

As with all things, there isn’t a bad product, only a bad price, so if this thing is notably cheaper than even something like the P310, this is still a decent choice. Annndddd it’s not. This 2TB version, even from Aliexpress, is £110. That’s the same price as the 2280 version of the P310, and a number of the other 7GB/s rated gen 4 SSDs. As I said in the E5000 video, these unknown and less performant drives need to be priced LOWER than their well known, reputable and faster competitors to have any chance of being competitive. If this was £90 (which is the ex-VAT price), this might be a compelling choice as it offers similar performance to drives like the P310, while offering a decent price incentive to try this out. As it stands though, I don’t know why you’d buy this over the myriad of other options on the market.