Biwin M560 2TB SSD Review: The DRAM-less drive to beat

Comparison Products

We considered pitting the Biwin M560 against some truly high-end drives, but truth be told, we don’t think that’s a valid comparison. If you’re someone who wants DRAM and maximum bandwidth — that means eight flash channels — then this drive is not going to cut it, even if it performs like it does. On the other hand, you may legitimately want a drive in this range that isn’t going to burn your house down. That’s closer to what we’re looking at here. We did throw in the PCIe 4.0 Kingston NV3 for good measure, since it’s using SMI’s comparable controller of that generation, but we suspect that if you’re looking at PCIe 5.0 drives, you are not going to settle for anything less.

To that end, we have direct competitors with Phison’s E31T controller: the Addlink G55, the PNY CS2150, the Corsair MP700 Elite, and the Crucial P510, the last of which has Micron rather than Kioxia flash. We’ve thrown in the SM2504XT ES to show any differences against the more mature M560. We also have a higher-end DRAM-less drive in the Biwin Black Opal X570, which has eight channels. We also have the Crucial T700, which doesn’t break the DRAM and bandwidth rule because, for one, it’s using the older Phison E26 controller and, for two, it’s not the full 14 GB/s variant. There are 10 GB/s drives using that controller, but we think the 12 GB/s T700 is the most appropriate comparison.

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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You love to see it: the M560 blows the doors off this benchmark. It comes second only to the ES but, for all intents and purposes, it’s well above any of the competition. This flash is exceptional, but clearly the controller makes the difference here. There are faster high-end drives like the WD Black SN8100, but that uses BiCS8 TLC and an SMI controller, too. This is an SM2508 “Mini-Me,” which is perfect if you want a fast drive without the baggage of a top-end drive.

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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The M560 and SM2504XT ES switched places this time, with the Biwin drive ending up in first place. It’s well ahead of the other drives, with almost half the latency of the NV3. This is an extremely responsive SSD that’s not too far off from the very best, finishing in the top ten of all drives we’ve ever tested.

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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The PS5, why not? The M560 has good results here, as expected, even if it is overkill. We can still recommend it, as it’s going to run very cool at PCIe 4.0 speeds. We think you’re usually better off with a 4TB PCIe 4.0 drive like the Addlink A93, pound for pound, but this one would work.

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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This is the one less impressive test for the drive, and it’s not unexpected, as the SM2504XT also fared somewhat poorly here. The M560 beats it at copying and reading, but not at writing. For copying, it also gets ahead of the P510, which, in our opinion, isn’t bad. Phison’s controller with BiCS8, with the CS2150, MP700 Elite, and G55, is just faster. We can’t chalk this up to a bandwidth difference or a latency difference, so our best guess is that the SMI controller is just not as well-optimized here.

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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Let’s start with ATTO. For writes, the M560’s curve is quite nice, and it only loses to the T700 — which has double the flash channels, DRAM, and a higher bandwidth ceiling — at the largest block sizes. It even mostly outdoes the eight-channel X570 that’s rated for 10 GB/s with sequential writes. Reads are more of a mixed bag, but in general it’s better than any other drive except for the T700, which it defeats at 2 MiB and up, and the X570, which beats it in that same range. Effectively, this makes the M560 a monster drive for its class any way you slice it.

If we turn our attention towards CDM, we see that it dominates with sequential performance against not only the other retail drives in its class but the X570 as well, except at QD8 for reads. This is a powerhouse for what it is. If we look at 4KB performance, we see two different things, with one that weighs more than the other. The first is 4KB QD1 random write latency, which isn’t bad but not up to the level of what we’ve seen with this flash. The maximum IOPS at QD256 also lags. For reads, though, the M560 comes into its own: ahead of the E31T drives at high QD for 4KB random reads but, more importantly, top in QD1 latency against all drives here.

That result, more than any other, should compel you to consider this drive. It’s exceptionally responsive for what matters in daily use. It’s not quite as fast as WD and Sandisk’s drives with Sandisk BiCS8 flash, but it’s very close. Phison’s E31T just doesn’t come close.

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 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 including the steady state write performance.

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The M560 has three distinct write states: the pSLC cache, direct to TLC flash, and a folding mode where it has to wait for data to be moved over from the pSLC to the TLC. In the first mode, it writes at an average of over 10.3 GB/s for over 59 seconds with a cache of around 611 GB. This is plenty fast for a drive of this type, and the cache is a good size. That figure is from an empty drive, and as with any dynamic cache, it will shrink as the drive fills. It is possible to dedicate more of the TLC flash to this mode, but that has drawbacks. A larger cache usually means the drive will be slower and less consistent with writes when the cache is exhausted.

In the middle native write mode, the drive writes at over 4.1 GB/s, which is also what our steady-state result shows: that chart averages the last 30 seconds of the run, and by then the drive had written about 2TB and was back to writing at its native speed. This is in part misleading and in part not. It’s not misleading because, in fact, the flash can maintain this native speed under the right circumstances. It is misleading that you’d end up with this at the end of your writes because the drive will outrun the cache, and there will not be enough space left to handle the incoming writes. This forces the drive to “fold” data from the cache to the native TLC, which interferes with the direct write process, increasing latency and lowering the write speed. The resulting speed is usually less than half the native and, in this case, is somewhere above 1.6 GB/s, which is by no means terrible when some QLC-based drives end up at 10% of that. Note, however, that the ES we tested with the same hardware has a more consistent 2.1 GB/s write speed line, and this is due to it having a much smaller cache.

While the large cache here means that this drive really isn’t ideal for sustained write workloads, the fact it can get over 4 GB/s with its flash is pretty incredible. This would have been above and beyond just about every PCIe 4.0 drive in existence, and with just half the channels. This is a very fast drive and, frankly, feels like a high-end drive if you can get past the fact it “only” hits a bit above 10 GB/s. In practice, for longer writes that still fit in its roughly 600 GB cache, it’s going to feel like one of the fastest drives out there. It’s just that some drives, like the P510, would be more suitable for write workloads where you want a smaller cache. Alternative cache configurations for this same hardware would also be better for that, but we have few to compare at the moment.

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 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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Given what we know from our ES preview, it comes as no surprise that the M560 is efficient. Very efficient. It’s a little shy of the numbers the Phison E31T drives with BiCS8 can put up, but it’s close enough to be negligible. It can pull more watts at peak, but the number is still manageable, and the average power draw is also superior. In fact, the idle power consumption is also relatively good, better than the Phison drives. Ideally, your system will be able to save power, but in the case where you favor responsiveness, the M560 does pull slightly fewer watts. Our take is that, on the whole, this drive delivers pretty excellent power numbers.

The drive ran relatively cool, too. The two sensors hit maximums of 61 and 76 degrees Celsius, respectively. This puts the latter about 10 degrees below throttling, which is closer than we like but is also plenty respectable for a fast, PCIe 5.0 SSD without a heatsink. We test during heavy writing, and the drive has a chonky cache, so we’d expect normal use to run somewhat cooler on average. Sensors aren’t always accurate, and we suspect the hotter one is showing the controller’s temperature, in which case this would probably be okay in most laptops. Would a heatsink help? Sure, but it shouldn’t be a requirement with how few watts this drive draws on average.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and antivirus 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 M560 Bottom Line

The Biwin M560 is one of the best all-around drives we’ve ever tested and, for its intended role, is probably the best retail option available. That “role” would be acting as a fast, capable, and efficient all-around boot or primary drive that also has to do other things, like handle gaming and work. Its 1TB and 2TB SKU range underlines this; it’s not a budget drive, and it’s not a storage drive. Not everybody needs or wants a monster 14+ GB/s drive with DRAM, but you might still want to take advantage of newer hardware. This hardware is faster, yes, particularly with insanely low 4KB read latency, but is also very power-efficient. It’s a good option even for PCIe 4.0 laptops, with the future-proofing an added bonus.

We have few complaints about the drive as a whole, except maybe that a 4TB option would have been nice, but we can live without it. From the performance side, things look very good, but we would be remiss if we didn’t point out that Biwin went with a large cache here. That has its plusses and its minuses. For the expected role, it was probably the right call. The drive also faltered a bit in DiskBench, but this only underlines our point about where it belongs: with lower performance there, the drive makes less sense as a second or third drive. Make no mistake, the M560 is quite capable of being your main drive as a very acceptable alternative to a more expensive Black SN8100 or equivalent.

As it is, we can highly recommend this drive. It’s one of the most responsive drives we’ve ever used and really feels “next gen,” whatever that might mean for an SSD. You should still go with a 4TB PCIe 4.0 DRAM-less option, like the A93 or NM790, if you want fast storage. Or a 2TB Black SN8100 if you want the very fastest main drive. Or something cheap for a secondary or games drive. If you want DRAM and can handle the heat, there are options there, too.

If, on the other hand, you want a dynamite drive that delivers a solid experience, something that won’t hold your desktop or laptop back, then the Biwin M560 would be at the top of our list.

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