Biwin Black Opal X570 Pro SSD Review: An 8TB unobtanium monster

Comparison Products

The only other 8TB high-end PCIe 5.0 drive we’ve tested so far is the Samsung 9100 Pro, although we’re expecting 8TB versions of the SanDisk WD Black SN8100, or SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100, and the Kingston Fury Renegade G5. The most popular 8TB SSD is probably the last-gen WD Black SN850X, or SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 850X. Other high-end drives in this category include the Corsair MP700 Pro XT – the first and only Phison E28-based drive we’ve reviewed so far – and the Crucial T710. The Biwin Black Opal X570 Pro is using older flash, like the Lexar NM1080 Pro, instead. It acts as a companion to the DRAM-less Black Opal X570, which in turn puts pressure on the older E26-based PCIe 5.0 drives like the Seagate FireCuda 540.

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 an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.

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The X570 Pro would make a fine games drive, and imagine having 8TB for games! It’s significantly faster than the Black SN850X, a great last-gen drive, and it gets close enough to the T710 that you’re not giving much up. The MP700 Pro XT and Black SN8100 still offer the best experience on the whole – an unparalleled experience, in fact – but the X570 Pro is a fine compromise.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is an industry-standard 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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It can be tough to gauge performance in the PCMark 10 storage benchmark as we’re dealing with way higher numbers than we did just a few years ago. You can look at the Black SN850X, a high-end PCIe 4.0 SSD, and see that drives like the X570 Pro are 50% faster. This is even when you are looking at latency, or responsiveness, rather than just bandwidth. This is a massive gain for heavier workloads as you’d find on a workstation. We’re also not talking about smaller, 1TB or even 2TB SSDs, but up to 8TB here. The X570 Pro more or less matches the 9100 Pro, and that means you are getting a pretty good experience.

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. Based on our extensive 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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It should come as no surprise that the X570 Pro is overkill for the PS5. The Black SN850X is probably a better choice if you just need the capacity, though, and is our recommendation.

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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2.6 GB/s might now sound fast anymore, but that’s actually pretty quick if you’re copying real-world files on the same drive. PCIe 4.0 drives tend to top off at 2 GB/s or less, while the very fastest PCIe 5.0 drives are around 3 GB/s. The X570 Pro falls somewhere in-between and that’s perfectly fine for its intended audience. Copy speeds are usually capped by the write speed and not the read speed, but if you’re working with multiple fast drives, the situation will be a bit different.

Copying is also usually at a low queue depth unless you’re doing a lot of transfers at once. So, the score here reflects the general speed of the drive as a whole with a realistic workload. The X570 Pro is certainly fast enough for heavier workflows. If you’re at the point where transfer times regularly matter, then it might be worth going for something faster.

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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ATTO can reveal weirdness in hardware and firmware, although the real-world impact varies. For the X570 Pro, read performance here is mixed past the 128KiB block size, which is generally negative. It still outpaces the SN850X and the regular X570 across its curve, but this isn’t a powerhouse. Write performance is good. We then see how that lines up with sequential performance in CDM and, yes, the X570 Pro is weak with reads at QD1. This is a fairly important metric because in many cases, sequential reads at QD1 will be the most common workload for transfers and app loading. So, disappointing, but if you are going to be pushing this hardware more fiercely – usually that means writes, mixed, and high queue depths – then you might not notice too much or at all.

Random performance on the whole is good, but the drive doesn’t stand out at all. It basically performs where we’d expect it to, falling into the middle with 4KB random read latency. This is still a very fast result that beats the PCIe 4.0 SN850X by over 10%.

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, the process of migrating data out of the cache 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 including the steady state write performance.

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Sustained write performance is often overlooked in reviews because just how often are you spamming a drive with writes? The fact is, if you’re buying a drive of this caliber, you may very well be doing so for its bandwidth potential. That means a drive that’s preconditioned and being put through its paces. Understanding how a drive responds in various states can give you a better idea of its consistency.

We are usually looking at three modes: pSLC, which is the ultrafast cache; native flash, which is usually TLC or QLC; and folding, where the drive has to wait before it can write more data as it is freeing up space eaten by the cache. In the first mode, the X570 Pro writes at 12.6 GB/s for 130 seconds for a ~1.6GB cache. An 8TB TLC flash drive can have a cache up to 2.7GB or so, and this drive’s cache is about 60% of that, a good compromise, as large caches lead to poor performance outside of the cache. For the second mode, the drive writes at around 6.85 GB/s – a very impressive speed – for quite a long time. If we force it to keep writing until it starts to fold, the speed drops to around 1.75 GB/s, which is actually still pretty fast if we were looking at typical last-gen drives.

If we are looking purely at the cache portion, the X570 Pro’s lasts the 2nd longest to the 9100 Pro’s, so it’s no surprise they are both at the bottom for sustained performance once the folding mode is hit. Larger caches demand such a trade-off. However, the X570 Pro’s TLC mode ranges for a very long time at a higher speed than just about everything but the NM1090 Pro – these drives use the same hardware – and it does so with higher consistency. We would expect this outcome, in part, because it has twice the flash of the NM1090 Pro and four times that of other drives like the MP700 Pro, and having more flash ensures you have enough parallelization for maximum performance.

The takeaway here shouldn’t be the folding mode performance. It should be that the first two modes of the drive can match anything out there if you count duration and consistency, which makes this a very good drive for heavier write workloads. It’s really pushing the limits of the flash to achieve this, and it’s really something only possible on a controller as powerful as the SM2508. We would expect the 8TB Kingston Fury Renegade to outdo this drive, and the Black SN8100 or Optimus GX 8100 PRO would also be right there, but in terms of drives that are actually available that we’ve tested, this is as good as it gets.

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 in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case scenario for idle.

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, but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.

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Powerful drives often have a nasty drawback: high power consumption. They need to hit a certain threshold to be usable without a heatsink or in most laptops. Where that line is drawn can vary, as, for the most part, your SSDs will idle. We mentioned before that this drive maxed out at 9.7W in our testing, and that is rather high. However, its efficiency ends up being average, which is not too bad at all. We do think it could use a heatsink and that it’s probably not the best drive for a laptop – you’d be better served with the Black SN8100, MP700 Pro XT, and some other select drives in this class like the Fury Renegade G5 – but it’s far from being like the early high-gen PCIe 5.0 drives. It’s manageable.

This is a double-sided drive with full-fledged DRAM, which means you’re packing a lot of power on this PCB. In our testing, the drive reached up to 81°C for the worst sensor compared to a throttle temperature of 86°C. Does this mean we were just 5°C away from throttling? Maybe, or maybe not. Other sensors reported much cooler temperatures. If this sensor is reporting something closer to the ASIC or controller temperature, 81°C is nothing to worry about. Still, given our readings, we would highly recommend a heatsink for this drive, and it’s probably too toasty for a laptop without one.

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 Pro Bottom Line

The Biwin Black Opal X570 Pro is fast, very fast, but far from the fastest drive we’ve ever tested. That’s okay because it comes at 8TB, which, aside from the Samsung 9100 Pro, is pretty rare for this caliber of drive. The older, PCIe 4.0 Black SN850X remains the most common 8TB drive on the market, as it’s been priced effectively for a long time and had several sales where those who wanted 8TB probably grabbed one. If you were waiting for 8TB in a high-end PCIe 5.0 drive, though, the 9100 Pro was your best bet. The X570 Pro offers an alternative that has its pros and cons when put up against that drive.

The X570 Pro’s overall performance is, in a word, excellent, even though it falls behind some faster drives like the Black SN8100. It’s good enough across all benchmarks that it can handle any task you throw at it. It’s particularly good with sustained writes with a very large cache and a surprisingly fast TLC or native flash mode. This means that it can handle even very large writes at probably the fastest speeds we’ve seen. Having 8TB of flash certainly helps there. Yes, it still falters if it manages to run completely out of cache, but this is rare, and even in that state it matches the 9100 Pro. We have no complaints in that comparison, especially as performance is otherwise in the same ballpark.

Power efficiency is also superior to the early high-end PCIe 5.0 drives, but mediocre at best against newer ones. We don’t think this is a good candidate for laptops, HTPCs, or environments with a lot of heat unless you can put a heatsink on it. We would definitely recommend that regardless. The drive is still manageable in many systems, though, and Biwin doesn’t leave you high and dry without support. The warranty is solid with a decent TBW rating, and the Biwin Intelligence toolbox app is quite comprehensive. We just wish this drive had better availability at this time so we could actively compare pricing.

At least 8TB capacity options are few and far between, and we can state with confidence that the X570 Pro would be a reasonable choice there and, if priced competitively, at lower capacities as well.

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