Gigabyte Aorus 2TB SSD
This PCIE 4.0 SSD is seriously hot stuff,
This PCIE 4.0 SSD is seriously hot stuff, says Jeremy Laird. It’s also super fast – for a while. We explain the good the bad and the shiny of the latest SSD technology.
The inclusion of big, fat fans is the bare minimum for a modern PC processor, and liquid cooling is almost the norm for performance CPUS. With the arrival of the new Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 SSD, we’re beginning to wonder whether solid-state storage could – or, perhaps more pertinently, should – head the same way.
The Aorus is notable for its double-sided copper heat spreader, which lowers temperatures by 16 per cent. The question is whether this improves performance. After all, do SSDS actually run that hot? Well, er…
The Aorus supports the latest 4.0 specification of the PCI Express interface and features the Phison PS5016-E16 controller chipset – not a surprise as 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.
Fast and hot
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 thermalthrottles under such workloads, even with the copper heat spreader. Point being, if it takes nearly half the drive’s capacity to start throttling, that’s easier to tolerate. Indeed, a 250GB drive based on this technology would probably fill up before it throttled. Elsewhere, the Auros largely performs extremely well, its numbers (4,906/4,270MB/S read/write) very much in line with what you’d expect – 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 – the Auros scoring 214/660MB/S 4K read/ write with a queue depth of 4.
All the same, the throttling issues thrown up by the Auros do make us ponder whether we are likely to see active-cooled SSDS sometime soon. 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.