Being one of China's prominent server makers, Huawei has been offering its own-brand solid-state drives with its datacenter machines for some time. However, for its client PCs the company relied on SSDs made by third parties. Now it looks like the company is changing its attitude towards client drives and is rolling out its own brand eKitStore Xtreme 200, reports IT Home.
The first retail SSD family from Huawei — the eKitStore Xtreme 200 lineup — are rather modest DRAM-less NVMe 2.0-compliant PCIe Gen4 x4 SSDs featuring 512GB – 4TB capacities aimed at notebooks and featuring a thin graphene heat spreader. Performance vice, we are talking about the drives that offer up to 7,400 MB/s sequential read speeds as well as up to 6,700 MB/s sequential write speeds, which is in line with some of the best PCIe Gen4 x4 SSDs. The SSDs also promise a random read speed of up to 1.1 million 4K IOPS and up to a million of 4K IOPS. The drives consume up to 4.8W while writing and up to 20mW in idle.
As for endurance, the 4TB model has a total bytes written (TBW) rating of 4,400TB over five years, which equals to 0.6 drive writes per day and which is higher compared to DWPD ratings of most inexpensive SSDs available on the market today.
Huawei does not disclose which controllers its eKitStore Xtreme 200 lineup uses, nor what kind of memory, though based on the touted high-performance and low power consumption, we suggest that this is a fairly modern platform.
Of course, we can only wonder whether Huawei has developed an SSD controller itself, but given the fact that a prominent SSD controller developer would have to get an export license from the U.S. Department of Commerce to sell its products to Huawei, it is possible that Huawei uses either an in-house controller, or a controller designed by a China-based company that does not care about possible sanctions from the U.S. government.
While enthusiasts may not be exactly impressed by Huawei's eKitStore Xtreme 200 SSDs as these are PCIe 4.0 x4 drives, since most laptops come with PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2-2280 slots, it is logical for Huawei to make such SSDs. Yet, we can only wonder whether Huawei is also working on PCIe Gen5 x4 drives for next-gen laptops.
