XPG Gammix S70 2TB

JUST WHEN you were beginning to think that Phison had a complete stranglehold on the third-party SSD controller market, here comes the XPG Gammix S70 to blow that notion away. Lift this M.2 drive’s beefy alloy lid and you’ll find none other than an InnoGrit IG5236 chip, which is somewhat intriguing.

So, what can we tell you about the InnoGrit IG5236?

It’s a multi-core controller with NVMe 1.4 support, eight memory channels, and a quad-lane PCIe 4.0 interface. Like the Phison E18, it’s built on TSMC’s 12nm FinFET process, which bodes well for things like clockspeeds, thermals, and efficiency.

Of course, merely being novel isn’t going to cut it.

Nor is multiple gigabytes of bandwidth in each direction. The SSD market is thick with PCIe Gen 4 drives that can hammer out huge numbers.

That said, the headline speeds do look pretty decent, what with 7,400MB/s claimed reads and 6,800MB/s writes. What’s more, the InnoGrit chip supports both SLC caching and DRAM cache.

In this implementation, you get 666GB of SLC cache and 2GB of DDR4 DRAM cache. All thoroughly competitive, if a little devilish, so far.

If it’s chinks in the armor you seek, however, there are a few. For starters, the drive’s peak IOPS are quoted at 650K for reads and 740K for writes. That’s a little off the one-million-IOPS pace set by several drives here. Similarly, the 1,480TB of claimed write endurance is fully 1,000TB behind the very best.

In both cases, you could argue that kind of on-paper comparison doesn’t mean much in the real world.

That’s especially true of the write endurance rating. Do the math and it works out to 810GB of writes each and every day for no fewer than five years. That’s gotta be enough for almost anyone. Speaking of five years being enough, that’s how long the warranty is, too.

While we’re having a go, you could also argue that the Gammix S70’s NAND chips are a little old hat, too, being Micron’s 96-layer TLC output rather than the very latest 176-layer items. But what really matters is how this thing performs—and the XPG’s performance can be reasonably described as pretty stellar.

How so? Well, it’s the fastest drive here by several metrics. It has comfortably the quickest sequential read speed at 7,451MB/s, while its sequential writes are only a little off the pace at 6,793.

Arguably even more impressive is the S70’s 4K random write performance, given 4K throughput is both so much harder to achieve than sequential and arguably has more impact on the actual feel of your PC. At 262MB/s, it’s the quickest on test.

Just a little less impressive is the 4K read result of 74MB/s. 2,879 points in PC Mark’s storage test doesn’t exactly set the benchmark table alight, either. The operating temperature under load of 67°C is arguably a little warmer than we’d like, too, especially considering that big heatsink.

So, this drive is a very strong, but not quite flawless performer. If the only metrics that mattered were pure performance and anticipated longevity, the XPG Gammix S70 would be a decent contender for your money, but probably not an outright winner. But there’s one more dimension to consider. And that’s the price.

At pretty much $100 less than the other two 2TB drives on test, this SSD represents outstanding value. Money no object, we’d go for the Seagate drive. However, money is an object for most people, including us.

If the price is a consideration for you, too, the Gammix S70 is easily close enough to the Seagate in every other regard for its reasonable price tag to push it over the line.

VERDICT VERDICT 9

XPG Gammix S70 2TB

TRUE GRIT Strong performance in many metrics; stellar value for money.

A LITTLE BIT SHI… 4K reads not all that; runs just a little too warm.

$259, www.xpg.com