GIGABYTE AORUS GEN4 2TB SSD
This PCIe 4.0 SSD is seriously hot stuff.
With the arrival of the new Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 SSD, we’re beginning to wonder whether solid-state storage should include active cooling. The Aorus is notable for its double-sided copper heat spreader, which lowers temperatures by 16 percent. The question is whether this improves performance. After all, do SSDs actually run that hot?
We have answers for you, but first let’s cover off the Aorus’s speeds and feeds. It’s the second SSD we’ve seen with support for the latest 4.0 specification of the PCI Express interface, the first being the Corsair MP600. It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that both drives feature the Phison PS5016-E16 controller chipset, given it’s one of the first to support PCIe 4.0.
For the record, the Phison PS5016-E16 features eight NAND channels, DDR4 DRAM caching, four PCIe 4.0 links, and the NVMe protocol in 1.3 spec, so it’s bang up to date. Paired with TLC NAND flash memory and 2GB of cache memory, the upshot, for this 2TB model of the Aorus range at least, includes sequential read performance of 5GB/s, writes of 4.4GB/s, and IOPS around the 750,000 mark.
These are, we need hardly point out, very big numbers indeed, even if they do leave a fair bit on the table in terms of the peak theoretical bandwidth available from a quad-link PCIe 4.0 interface. The question is how all that translates into real-world performance. The answer involves the aforementioned thermal properties we alluded to at the outset.
Throw a large sustained workload at the Auros and it starts out crazy fast, but eventually slows to what you might characterise as SATA speeds. In our testing, it took around 300GB of sustained writes before the drive dropped from performance measured in GB/s down to around 400–600MB/s. At which point it was very, very hot to the touch.
Long story short, we believe the Auros thermal throttles under such workloads, even with the copper heat spreader. The same is true of the Corsair offering, but that was a significantly smaller drive. Point being, if it takes nearly half the drive’s capacity to throttle, that’s easier to tolerate. Indeed, a 250GB drive based on this technology would probably fill up before it throttled. With 2TB on offer here, you’re arguably more likely to actually run up against this limitation.
Anyway, elsewhere, the Auros largely performs extremely well, its numbers very much in line with the Corsair MP600, except for our internal file copy test, which was disappointing for reasons we do not fully comprehend. In any case, it still qualifies as a very, very fast NAND drive. Intel’s Optane drives maintain the crown in terms of 4K random access performance, of course, but these new PCIe 4.0 NAND drives aren’t too shabby for 4K, either.
If this drive is anything to go by, active cooling may be necessary to sustainably make the most of the huge bandwidth on offer from PCI Express 4.0. If this Auros is overheating at 5GB/s, hitting 8GB/s could send solid-state drives into serious meltdown.