Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 7000s M.2 NVMe SSD Review: Nanocarbon Cooled for Speed (Updated)

Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen4 7000s is fast, secure, and keeps cool thanks to a sleek heatsink and nanocarbon coating

Reviews
By Sean Webster
published
Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 7000s - 1TB
Editor's Choice
(Image: © Tom's Hardware)

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Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen4 7000s is smoking fast with performance that trades blows with the best SSDs on the market. We’re not quite sure what to attribute the minor performance improvements versus the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, whether it's the thermal headroom provided by the heatsink or if it's just due to their special firmware mix, but regardless, it's working well.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

This Gen4 7000s has got style with that very slick heatsink, too. Not only is it one of the best-looking heatsinks that we’ve come across, but it’s also very effective at keeping the Aorus Gen4 7000s cool with that nanocarbon coating. Thermal throttling shouldn’t be much of a worry when you hit the SSD with heavy transfers and great news for content creators and the like. Not to mention, Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen4 7000s is priced competitively for what it brings to the table. While still costly overall, at 2TB, Gigabyte is currently a little cheaper than the Samsung 980 Pro and Sabrent’s Rocket 4 Plus and on par with the  WD’s Black SN850 while also providing AES 256-bit encryption support. 

Plus, it also comes with a solid 5-year warranty that you don’t need to register for, no tricks or strings attached other than the endurance rating shackling it down. But, even so, most consumers and prosumers will never come near to wearing out the Gen4 7000s with its endurance rating tipping the scales at 1.4PB at 2TB. For those on the lookout for a heatsinked SSD that can keep up with and even trade blows with the best, Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen4 7000s is a solid offering. It comes with all the features you could ask for from a high-end enthusiast-grade NVMe SSD and is reasonably priced as such.

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Sean Webster
Sean Webster
Storage Reviewer

Sean is a Contributing Editor at Tom’s Hardware US, covering storage hardware.

6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • waltc3
    Don't quite get the "costly" remark...the GB 1TB is $10 more than the latest Amazon pricing for the 980 Pro 1TB; the 2TB 980 Pro is via Amazon $10 more than this GB. I don't see how "costly" qualifies. For its class of performance, cost seems right on the nose--but of course something slower will cost less, etc.
    Reply
  • Makaveli
    "Gigabyte backs the Aorus Gen4 7000s with a 5-year warranty and each comes with respectable write endurance ratings - up to 700TB per 1TB in capacity. Such high endurance is thanks to Phison’s fourth-generation LDPC and RAID ECC, wear leveling, a bit of over-provisioning."
    Endurance has dropped on all these E18 drives compared to the E16 ones.

    The E16 based drives at 1TB do 1,800 TBW which is more than the 2TB drive on E18. And E16 based 2TB drive does 3,600 TBW. And i've yet to see anyone ask them or get an explanation on why the endurance rating in less on new controller.

    "But, even so, most consumers and prosumers will never come near to wearing out the Gen4 7000s with its endurance rating tipping the scales at 1.4PB at 2TB. "
    That is a type-o there are no consumer drives with 1.4 PB of endurance that should be 1.4 TB

    Also wonder if its just firmware tweaking on this drive that has it producing abit better scores than other E18 based drives.
    Reply
  • seanwebster
    waltc3 said:
    Don't quite get the "costly" remark...the GB 1TB is $10 more than the latest Amazon pricing for the 980 Pro 1TB; the 2TB 980 Pro is via Amazon $10 more than this GB. I don't see how "costly" qualifies. For its class of performance, cost seems right on the nose--but of course something slower will cost less, etc.
    Overall, I see both as quite costly in terms of price per GB.

    Makaveli said:
    Endurance has dropped on all these E18 drives compared to the E16 ones. The E16 based drives at 1TB do 1,800 TBW which is more than the 2TB drive on E18. And E16 based 2TB drive does 3,600 TBW. And i've yet to see anyone ask them or get an explanation on why the endurance rating in less on new controller.
    It's probably because the flash runs faster, thus having a detrimental effect on endurance, or maybe just that Phison's sales teams are not offering that sort of contract anymore with this generation. Also worth noting, last gen came with BiCS flash, the current generation of E18 SSDs all come with Micron's 96L TLC. So, it may be even farther up the chain. Though, the newer flash will be out shortly. A few E18-based SSDs with Micron's 176L TLC are in the works.

    Makaveli said:
    "But, even so, most consumers and prosumers will never come near to wearing out the Gen4 7000s with its endurance rating tipping the scales at 1.4PB at 2TB. "That is a type-o there are no consumer drives with 1.4 PB of endurance that should be 1.4 TB

    It's not a typo. It has 1.4 petabytes of endurance, equal to 1,400 terabytes. I don't think any SSD has such low endurance as 1.4TB. Even consumer SSDs from 10 years ago came with 72TB endurance ratings.

    waltc3 said:
    Also wonder if its just firmware tweaking on this drive that has it producing abit better scores than other E18 based drives.
    I highly suspect so, too. More so now that I received another new batch of E18 drives this week and just started testing them today. They are also exhibiting similar performance improvement from what I can tell thus far.

    I still am having SLC cache measuring issues, though. Whenever I run the high QD sequential write test to these SSDs, once the SMART reports 70C, the drives pull back to that slower 1.8 GBps write speed around the 200-300GB mark. (This isn't the case when you do multiple drag and drops in real-world use in Windows. )
    Reply
  • Makaveli
    seanwebster said:
    Overall, I see both as quite costly in terms of price per GB.


    It's probably because the flash runs faster, thus having a detrimental effect on endurance, or maybe just that Phison's sales teams are not offering that sort of contract anymore with this generation. Also worth noting, last gen came with BiCS flash, the current generation of E18 SSDs all come with Micron's 96L TLC. So, it may be even farther up the chain. Though, the newer flash will be out shortly. A few E18-based SSDs with Micron's 176L TLC are in the works.


    It's not a typo. It has 1.4 petabytes of endurance, equal to 1,400 terabytes. I don't think any SSD has such low endurance as 1.4TB. Even consumer SSDs from 10 years ago came with 72TB endurance ratings.


    I highly suspect so, too. More so now that I received another new batch of E18 drives this week and just started testing them today. They are also exhibiting similar performance improvement from what I can tell thus far.

    I still am having SLC cache measuring issues, though. Whenever I run the high QD sequential write test to these SSDs, once the SMART reports 70C, the drives pull back to that slower 1.8 GBps write speed around the 200-300GB mark. (This isn't the case when you do multiple drag and drops in real-world use in Windows. )

    Sorry yes you are correct i'm not use to see it written as 1.4PB on the consumer drives that does equal 1400 TBW.

    I have been waiting to see the drives using Micron 176L TLC so will be keeping an eye on that.

    I've been disappointed with some of the newer drives having very small SLC caches. The E16 Corsair drive i'm using has about a 333GB SLC cache. While the new E18 Corsair drive its smaller. And this seem to very per manufacturer.

    Looking forward to more of your reviews and numbers.
    Reply
  • derekullo
    Makaveli said:
    "Gigabyte backs the Aorus Gen4 7000s with a 5-year warranty and each comes with respectable write endurance ratings - up to 700TB per 1TB in capacity. Such high endurance is thanks to Phison’s fourth-generation LDPC and RAID ECC, wear leveling, a bit of over-provisioning."
    Endurance has dropped on all these E18 drives compared to the E16 ones.

    The E16 based drives at 1TB do 1,800 TBW which is more than the 2TB drive on E18. And E16 based 2TB drive does 3,600 TBW. And i've yet to see anyone ask them or get an explanation on why the endurance rating in less on new controller.

    "But, even so, most consumers and prosumers will never come near to wearing out the Gen4 7000s with its endurance rating tipping the scales at 1.4PB at 2TB. "
    That is a type-o there are no consumer drives with 1.4 PB of endurance that should be 1.4 TB

    Also wonder if its just firmware tweaking on this drive that has it producing abit better scores than other E18 based drives.

    A 2 terabyte ssd with 1.4 terabytes of write endurance.

    Also known as a 1.4 terabyte SSD-R :p
    Reply
  • Sleepy_Hollowed
    Hm... were it not for the current increase in prices when availability drops, if I can find these at the prices listed when that happens, that'd OK pricing.

    Either would be a nice game drive honestly, not so much an OS + game drive if you do other stuff on the background.

    If gigabyte keeps up with the firmware updates for security for those 5 years, then it's a decent drive. Not that Windows supports bitlocker hardware encryption anymore, but for other operating systems hardware AES-256 is mighty fine.
    Reply