Biwin Black Opal X570 2TB SSD Review: Caught In The Middle With You

Comparison Products

The Biwin Black Opal X570 has stiff competition from high-end PCIe 5.0 SSDs and has to slot itself above the mid-range options, so we arranged our group of test SSDs accordingly. With Phison’s E26 now becoming obsolete, the X570 is one possible replacement, as are drives with newer controllers but older flash, like the Acer Predator GM9000. Phison has its updated E28 controller on the way, but we haven’t tested retail drives with the new controller yet.

In this case, Silicon Motion has beaten them to the punch with its comparable SM2508 controller. This controller awed us with its high power efficiency, and retail drives have been impressive. These include the Sandisk WD_Black SN8100 and the Crucial T710, drives that use different TLC flash. Samsung has kept its proprietary controller on the 9100 Pro. To cap things off, we have mid-range, Phison E31T-based drives with the Crucial P510 and Corsair MP700 Elite. These two drives are also using different TLC flash, so the comparisons cover all areas.

Lastly, we wanted to give an impression of how a high-end DRAM-less Gen 5 drive like the X570 compares to the best DRAM-equipped Gen 4 drives. Our stand-in here for the latter is the excellent Samsung 990 Pro. If you’re coming from a PCIe 3.0 or DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 drive, the gap will be even more significant, and a drive of the 990 Pro’s class – among which we would have the WD Black SN850X and the Crucial T500 – is probably as low as you should go if you’re gunning for a high-performance drive.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.

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When we look at 3DMark, we’re mostly looking at the latency results as these can give an idea of drive responsiveness, which, for gaming, most closely aligns with load times. The benefits will differ from game to game, with many seeing no advantage at all, while others can load a second or two faster with the best drives. This is not something the average user will notice or care about, but if you’re looking at PCIe 5.0 drives, you probably want to take it into consideration.

In this case, the X570 performs closer to the mid-range DRAM-less PCIe 5.0 drives based on the Phison E31T controller, like the Crucial P510 or the Corsair MP700 Elite. We would expect the X570 to be more expensive than these due to controller complexity, but not by a lot. It will also probably lean more towards higher capacities where the fixed cost of the controller is less impactful, meaning it could be competitive, especially by offering a 4TB SKU out of the gate. This will save you money over the high-end drives with DRAM while maintaining the high bandwidth that they have, coupled with reasonably good game load performance that matches any of the mid-range options.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

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In PCMark 10, which is the application-oriented benchmark complement to 3DMark, the X570 fares a little better. Here it remains past the mid-range PCIe 5.0 drives but still falls short of the high-end. This still means it beats any drive below its class, which, when coupled with lower pricing, could make it a reasonable alternative. This puts the most pressure on the mid-range drives like the P510 and MP700 Elite, but again, this would be felt hardest at higher capacities.

For lower capacities, those drives still make sense, although you need a certain amount of flash to push PCIe 5.0 bandwidth. In other words, you could compromise with the lower-end drives at 1TB or maybe 2TB, but if you want 4TB, then the X570 presents a better case.

If you need less space than 1TB, you should probably go with a PCIe 4.0 solution. If you need more, that is 8TB, then the venerable WD Black SN850X still makes a lot of sense. If you want Gen 5 performance, though, you could wait for the Samsung 9100 Pro’s 8TB SKU, but that’s likely to cost an arm and a leg.

This leaves the door open to an 8TB drive based on the MAP1806 controller – perhaps the X570 could even add an 8TB SKU down the road, which is quite possible. That might be easier with denser, 2Tb flash dies, which would probably mean QLC flash over TLC, but we’ll have to wait and see. There probably is a place for such a drive, but with QLC flash and such high bandwidth potential, there would probably be a need for a multi-stage write cache, as used by the Micron 2600.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. In our testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

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We can’t really recommend the X570 for the PS5 as there are less expensive options that offer a comparable experience. If you’re intending to move the drive over to a PC later, it can do in a pinch, though.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

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What’s PCIe 5.0 without the bandwidth? The X570 demonstrates that it can beat any PCIe 4.0 drive, but it doesn’t really offer anything compelling in the PCIe 5.0 realm. We would like to test it at 4TB to see how it does there against specific drives. The GM9000 beats it handily at 2TB, but a drive with the same hardware at 4TB – such as the Lexar NM1090 Pro, featured in an upcoming review – can actually perform worse, with results closer to the 2TB X570. Likewise, the mid-range drives like the P510 and MP700 Elite also perform roughly at the level of the X570, but those drives top out at 2TB right now.

All of this is to argue, again, that the X570 and drives like it could be a compelling option at 4TB. You’ll still get better performance out of the best PCIe 5.0 drives, but once you factor in cost, the X570 could become more interesting.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

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We see nothing unusual in the X570’s ATTO results aside from the fact that it can’t quite hit the high notes that high-end PCIe 5.0 drives like the WD_Black SN8100 can. It does perform better than the MP700 Elite and P510, though, and also may outpace any of the Phison E26-based drives like the MP700 Pro SE. Realistically, it’s best to move on from the E26 and look at newer controllers with older flash for comparison instead. These are the ones that might be a little less expensive. A good example would be the Acer Predator GM9000 or Lexar NM1090 Pro. These do beat the X570 generally, but have the added cost of DRAM.

The X570 doesn’t fare much differently in CDM’s sequential results, at least at the queue depth of 1. This is the most common queue depth for regular file transfers. The X570 performs better at higher queue depths, particularly for reads, but it can’t quite keep up with the very best drives in terms of writes. To some extent, this can be blamed on the flash, but the use of that flash is part of the drive’s appeal if it helps keep the price down. Still, we suspect that with newer TLC, the X70 would perform better.

Unfortunately, the drive doesn’t perform very well when we look at random performance, particularly QD1 for 4K. These results probably preclude it from ever being a truly good drive, as it really should do better here. With different flash it might be better, and maybe this controller needs some firmware work, too. In any case, while it performs just dandy for games and storage, it isn’t as compelling for a primary storage solution. This is more of a secondary drive. This works at 4TB and would work at 8TB, possibly even with QLC flash, but this drive is a harder sell at lower capacities.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, which is the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.

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The 2TB X570 writes at just over 9.9 GB/s in the fast, single-bit pSLC cache mode for over 34 seconds. This is a 340GB cache, which is neither super large nor super small, reminiscent of the T710s. After the cache is exhausted, the drive writes in a TLC mode at between 3.6 and 3.7 GB/s. Finally, the drive hits a folding mode – where it is forced to move data over to empty the cache, reducing the speed of new incoming data – with a speed around 1.1 GB/s. The actual steady state performance is around 3.3 GB/s, which is not bad at all. This definitely feels more like an eight-channel drive, which gives it an edge over many drives like the MP700 Elite, but that does hurt power efficiency.

In terms of peak performance, it’s closer to early E26 drives like the Corsair MP700, which is disappointing in a way, but the higher and more consistent TLC mode performance puts it clearly ahead of that early adopter technology. The X570 also outperforms the MP700 Elite and P510 in all modes, which is crucial for it to do in order to remain competitive.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature.

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Is the X570 efficient? Yes. Is it as efficient as it needs to be? Not really. While the drive is largely an improvement over the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives, its power efficiency is lackluster when compared to newer PCIe 5.0 options. It’ll beat E26-based drives like the Crucial T705 in efficiency, but it has the same high idle power consumption issues that such drives have. Our idle power consumption results are intended for a desktop comparison, not laptop, as laptops should implement power-saving features correctly with most drives not sucking enough power when idle to impact battery life significantly.

This level of desktop idle power consumption is also not unusual for PCIe 5.0 drives, but an improvement in this area could have been in the X570’s favor. We would like to see something closer to the SN8100, but the flash does limit the X570 to some extent.

By S.M.A.R.T., the drive’s top power state is at 6.5W, which should be competitive, but in reality, it peaked at 8.48W, which is closer to what we would expect. As a result, the drive isn’t a grand slam for laptops and essentially isn’t taking much less power than it would if it had DRAM. Disappointing, but we think improvements can be made here with newer flash and other optimizations.

The good news is, the drive is efficient enough that it probably doesn’t need a heatsink. In our testing, the temperature topped out around 60°C, which is 30 degrees below the primary throttling point. As with the MAP1602, it’s likely the controller is a particular hotspot, so some heatspreading could be effective. Utilizing a heatspreader, a low-profile heatsink, or custom thermal padding would help if this drive is used in a laptop or other device where the ambient temperature might be higher.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Biwin Black Opal X570 Bottom Line

The Biwin Black Opal X570 is a unique drive, and on that basis alone, it’s worth a closer look. A DRAM-less, eight-channel controller hasn’t made a lot of sense in the past, as drives usually fall into one of two extremes: a budget, four-channel solution without DRAM, or an eight-channel monster with plenty of DRAM. This can impact other aspects of the drive, such as flash choice – QLC makes more sense on a budget drive, but the higher average density means it’s best at higher capacities. DRAM-less drives also usually have massive pSLC caches with terrible sustained performance after the cache is exhausted. The X570 changes this up as it uses TLC flash with a moderately-sized cache, and the eight-channel controller lifts up its bandwidth and IOPS potential.

In addition, this design opens the door to higher capacities not only from the channel count being doubled, but also the smaller DRAM-less controller allows for more NAND flash packages. This gives it a real boost over the mid-size PCIe 5.0 drives and also opens the door to 8TB drives down the road, and even fast QLC-based drives.

We’ve found in our review, though, that the performance with TLC flash is closer to early PCIe 5.0 drives, and the X570 cannot really compete with the high-end, DRAM-equipped options. This means it needs to be priced right and should lean more heavily on its capacity advantage. It’s definitely more powerful than the P510 and MP700 Elite, but feels like a luxury secondary drive when we’re looking at this price range.

If there’s one thing that really hammers this home, it’s the relatively tame power efficiency. A DRAM-less drive should be more efficient, and if you want to throw this in a laptop for some reason, it’s not particularly looking better than faster DRAM-equipped options. Future optimization with this controller and the use of new flash should improve things, but for now, this drive makes more sense as a speedy game and data drive. That makes sense, since using older flash pairs nicely with the budget approach. It makes it difficult to shoehorn this drive into the marketplace now that more efficient and faster drives are available. The X570 would have been inspirational if it came out against only the E26 SSD controller.

Then there’s the question of putting this up against less expensive PCIe 4.0 options. In our opinion, you can probably get away with PCIe 4.0 for games and certainly for the PS5. Many laptops also currently top out at PCIe 4.0. However, if you have a more modern system with two or more PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, the X570 is a compelling choice for a secondary drive.

Being able to move data around at these speeds is pretty ridiculous, and we think that underlines that this drive is best at higher capacities. Its performance is not lacking, although we would like to see improvements in latency. That would be possible with BiCS8 or new flash from SK hynix, but Maxio controllers are more commonly paired with YMTC or Micron flash.

Regardless, the X570 is not a bad drive by any means, but it’s definitely a niche storage solution that may pique the interest of enthusiasts. Other drives with this hardware will be coming out, and we might see variations on the flash and maybe higher capacities as well, so stay tuned.

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