Orico IG740-Pro 1TB SSD Review: A small budget sleeper

Comparison Products

When we say this is a “challenging market,” we mean that prices have gone crazy right after the point where we started to have a deluge of budget PCie 4.0 SSDs. The Orico IG740-Pro is in the middle of this maelstrom. Comparing drives in this climate is difficult as one is operating on uneven and unstable ground, at best. When we write these reviews, we are checking what drives are most available and competitive at that place and time.

The drive deserves fair representation. It’s being compared to QLC-based drives, but only the best: the SanDisk WD Blue SN5100 or Optimus 5100, the Crucial P310, which is headed off the market, and the HP FX700, which represents the YMTC QLC drives on the market. The TeamGroup MP44Q has the same hardware as the FX700 as reviewed, but we’ve seen Micron flash show up at least with the TLC-based counterparts, such as the Biwin Black Opal NV7400. Deeper budget options include the Kingston NV3, the older Samsung 990 EVO, and the once-popular TeamGroup MP44L.

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 IG740-Pro is surprisingly good, or surprisingly bad, in the 3DMark benchmark, depending on how you look at it. It matches the 990 EVO and Black Opal NV7400, two drives with TLC flash, but can’t match the Blue SN5100 or P310, two drives that are using “slower” QLC.

All the drives in this list are budget-oriented in one way or another, but these results prove that choosing a TLC drive over a QLC one is not going to be super important for gaming workloads. The IG740-Pro gives you a solid experience and one that outmatches budget favorites like the NV3 and MP44L.

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 SSD's PCMark 10 performance is also surprisingly good. Again, the Blue SN5100 and P310 really shine. It’s a testament to how good QLC flash can be these days with the proper controller and optimization. If you want to save some money and grab the IG740-Pro, though, you’re still getting decent mid-level performance. This drive is faster than any PCIe 3.0 model, and that includes latency. Your app-loading times will be swift.

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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While most drives do just fine in the PS5, this is one we wouldn’t necessarily recommend. For one, even though its performance is adequate for a decent console experience, it’s falling behind the competition. This might be because we’re looking at the 1TB SKU and it’s up against 2TB drives. But if you’re in a tight spot and can only afford 1TB for your PS5 extension drive, then the IG740-Pro is sufficient. Prices right now favor that outcome more than usual, so this drive stays on the map.

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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The 1TB “issue” is repeated with DiskBench, as being able to cache data and write fast requires more flash for optimal performance. A 1TB drive with 1Tb dies, like this one, can only interleave eight ways, if not including the internal planes. Peak performance would need double – sixteen total, or four dies for each of the four channels – this amount at 2TB. Still, the IG740-Pro beats the NV3, and for a 1TB drive, it does just fine.

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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The IG740-Pro has the expected performance levels we would expect from it in ATTO, generally hitting a peak below the 2TB drives but holding its own against the 1TB MP44L. The 990 EVO is an exception, and we really recommend only the 990 EVO Plus if you’re going with Samsung in this range. We would also point out that the MP44L wins with ATTO reads, and to some extent, this is because our original test sample was TLC-based. TeamGroup’s MP44 and MP44L series are supposed to always have TLC flash, but drives in this class can come with QLC. QLC flash is slower than TLC, but often this is hidden by pSLC caching, which handles writes but can also involve caching hot reads, and software bottlenecks. In practice, we would expect better of the IG740-Pro’s hardware here, though.

The IG740-Pro is third for QD1 sequential reads in CDM. This is a very good result as it indicates how well the drive handles some real-world tasks. This is actually quite spry for a 1TB drive. This translates also to 4KB random reads at QD1, where the IG740-Pro has excellent latency that is almost rivaling the P310. QLC flash – used on the P310 – can often be very fast here because the architecture is usually optimized before TLC generationally. It benefits more from it as the performance gap is larger and is also specifically optimized for 4KB reads as a standard workload size. This aside, the IG740-Pro generally feels very responsive, and it is not lacking here.

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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The IG740-Pro first writes in the fastest, single-bit pSLC cache mode at around 4.6 GB/s for 36 seconds. The cache is 166GB, which is neither large nor small but somewhere in between. This is a good choice if you want to maintain some semblance of good performance when the cache is exhausted. The cache is more likely to be exhausted with longer writes and with a fuller drive.

This translates to the IG740-Pro, which we remind you is only at 1TB, so it has less flash to work with, averaging around 1 GB/s after the cache initially runs out. This is a reasonably good result and would have been a decent steady-state speed for a high-end PCIe 3.0 drive.

PCIe 4.0 drives can be up to twice as fast, and even with newer hardware, it can be difficult to maintain a high write speed, given that pSLC caches are so much larger these days. Nevertheless, when the IG740-Pro hits its very worst folding stage, the mode where the drive has to wait for data to be moved over, or folded, it still manages to write at over 450 MB/s. This is acceptable for a 1TB drive after that amount of writes.

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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The IG740-Pro is exceptionally efficient, with a score among some of the best we have on hand. It’s not at the level of the Blue SN5100 or Black SN7100, but it’s at or above the vast majority of drives on the market. This drive would be happy in any system. In fact, it barely got warm in our testing, and we can safely say it won’t need a heatsink. It’s true that 1TB drives often don’t run as hot as 2TB, but even with that consideration, this is a cool-running SSD.

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.

Orico IG740-Pro Bottom Line

The Orico IG740-Pro is a pleasant surprise, but not much more. We’ve already seen this hardware many times, and it’s hard to mess it up. We’re glad to see TLC flash here, of course – QLC swaps are quite common – and we have no real complaints about its performance. Power efficiency is also at or above expectations, so this is great for laptops, too. However, this does feel like a retread, and pricing is still a looming question. Assuming Orico can keep TLC flash on this drive, and they price it competitively, we have no problem recommending it. That’s no longer a likely assumption given current market conditions, though.

We also like that Orico offers this drive in several different capacities – it’s becoming more common for newer models to focus on 2TB, especially, as the price per TB these days has skyrocketed. Our sample is 1TB, which shows that it is still possible to get a smaller drive, although many users would like smaller still. We do think 2TB makes more sense from the capacity and performance standpoints, but sometimes you have to compromise.

If the IG740-Pro is one of the few drives left standing after that compromise, then you can safely pick it. It’s a better choice than many of the oddball budget drives like the TeamGroup NV5000, even if it seems to underperform against the likes of the SanDisk WD Blue SN5100. If you want DRAM or PCIe 5.0 performance, though, then obviously you should leave this one out. This is not a thoroughbred, but it will provide a solid experience in any system.

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