As prices of DDR5 memory kits set records in the U.S., in Europe they begin to show signs of descend. At least, this is what a DDR5 pricing graph published to a renowned PC enthusiasts community is meant to show. We also analyzed the pricing of several DDR5 kits from prominent suppliers in Germany, and we can certainly say that these kits cost less than they used to cost just weeks ago.

The chart allegedly depicts aggregated pricing of an 'average' 32 GB DDR5 kit across the European Union from late July 2025 to February 2026. Prices hovered around €95 (minimum, green) – €100 (average, blue) through early autumn, then began climbing sharply in October, accelerating through November and peaking in early February at roughly €430 – €470 on average, with minimum prices slightly lower. Toward the end of the period, both lines trend downward, which may either indicate a modest correction after the spike or an actual drop in prices due to certain factors.

While the graph from deserves attention, it lacks clarity and details (which kits, which countries, retailers, is VAT included, etc.), so we decided to do our own price trend checks of five popular 32 GB DDR5-6000/6400 dual-channel kits* from renowned brands like Crucial, Corsair, G.Skill, Kingston, and Patriot in Amazon Germany using the CamelCamelCamel service.

Among the 32 GB DDR5-6000/6400 kits that we checked, only two models — from Corsair and Kingston — demonstrated steep declines: from around €480 in early February to around €425 now for Corsair and from around €550 in early January to €463 at press time for Kingston. Nonetheless, all memory kits that we checked are now priced below their peaks several weeks ago. Note that all retail prices in Europe include VAT, unlike retail prices in the U.S.

We also checked price trends for the same 32 GB DDR5 kits in the U.S., and while the prices are far from where they were in September, some of them (G.Skill, Patriot) are also showing a modest correction, though we certainly cannot say that they are heading downwards.

While $400 is certainly way too high for a 32 GB DDR5-6000 memory kit in 2026, we are not going to see prices decline to normal levels due to shortages of memory chips, which is going to happen either when excessive demand for all kinds of memory drops, when new DRAM production capacities come online in late 2026 – 2027, or when DRAM makers transit to more efficient process technologies. Yet, the signs of correction clearly show that the retail DDR5 kits' prices are way too high, which affects demand significantly enough for retailers to slash their price tags.

*We used the following kits for our checks, as memory prices currently depend on supply, we did not specify based on whether the kits feature AMD Expo or Intel XMP profiles:

• Crucial Pro 32 GB DDR5-6400 (CP2K16G64C38U5B)
• Corsair Vengeance RGB 32 GB DDR5-6000 (CMH32GX5M2E6000C36)
• G.Skill Flare X5 Series 32 GB DDR5-6000 (F5-6000J3636F16GX2-FX5)
• Kingston Fury Beast 32 GB DDR5-6000 (KF560C30BBEK2-32)
• Patriot Viper Venom 32 GB DDR5-6000 (PVV532G600C36K)

Kingston Datacenter SSD Business Manager Cameron Crandall said in an interview that NAND prices for RAM and SSD are expected to rise throughout 2026. The Kingston employee said on The Full Nerd Network podcast that NAND prices increased by 246% from 1Q25, 70% of that happening in just the last 60 days. And with this component making up 90% of the bill of materials for an SSD, the company will have to adjust its pricing accordingly.

When asked how consumers could cope with the ongoing shortage and price hikes, Crandall said, “I think the best thing to do if you’re looking at upgrading your system is to do it now and not wait because prices are going to continue to go up.” He also added, “My advice today would be to not hold off on that purchase because it will be more expensive 30 days from now, and more likely it will be more expensive 30 days after that.” Crandall also stated that prices are increasing "like we've never seen" in 29 years of working at Kingston.

This contradicts Sapphire’s prediction that DRAM prices will stabilize within the next six to eight months, although Crandall says that the memory market has a pricing cycle and that we are in an upswing at the moment. It’s likely because of this that memory companies are holding back on expanding their production lines or building new fabs. After all, there is still the threat of the AI bubble that could leave chipmakers holding expensive NAND inventory with zero demand if it bursts.

Another question tackled during the episode is whether Kingston will follow in the footsteps of Micron and exit the consumer business. Thankfully, Crandall confirmed that Kingston is focused on the distribution channel and that the company, alongside other SSD and RAM suppliers, will take up the slack from the shutdown of Crucial.

In the end, Crandall hopes that the shortage doesn’t drag on too long. Although he does not believe that this pricing apocalypse would last a decade, as some suggest, he still says that pricing is not headed down anytime soon. So, if you’re on the market for memory or storage, he recommends that you get what you can right now.

An NV series drive from Kingston needs no introduction. The company has been a leader in SSD module manufacturing, with a strong focus on delivering affordable drives worldwide. This series is a budget lynchpin, a fan favorite for inexpensive builds and upgrades. The Kingston NV3 2230 follows in these footsteps to help conquer a market that’s seen unprecedented growth since Valve’s Steam Deck launch, a shorter form factor solution that faces extra challenges when the goal is maximum capacity. Kingston meets this head-on with a drive that’s also relatively inexpensive, an important consideration in an increasingly turbulent storage market.

The good and bad news is that this means you know what you’re going to get: an affordable, passable drive with usually wide availability but unknown hardware. The first part is good. As for the controller and flash, well, you know that you can never be sure, as the NV series uses whatever is available. That’s bad. How much does this matter for M.2 2230? Well, given the drive’s specifications, which set the minimum, this drive is plenty fast for any device that can take it. The controllers that pass muster and can fit on M.2 2230 are largely decent and will usually be paired with adequate flash – our sample has good hardware even with its QLC flash. This usually means a power-efficient drive, which is critically important for this form factor. The highest capacities also need newer or future flash to work, although we wouldn’t be surprised if some lingering QLC stock could end up on the drive, and that’s less ideal at the most common capacities.

We offer a hedge by relying on the old adage: you get what you pay for. The Kingston NV 2230 is inexpensive and fundamentally sound, but not high-end. If you’re looking for the fastest or best, this isn’t the drive for you. If you want something that will offer an excellent experience at a lower cost, then it should certainly be on your list. It’s likely equal to or better than many no-name brands, and the wide capacity range on offer lets you dial in exactly what you need. It can always be extended in length to fit M.2 2242 or 2280 slots, too. Our sample has excellent power efficiency, so we see no problem with that from a cooling perspective, keeping in mind that usually M.2 2280 versions of drives have more surface area for heat dissipation. To wrap it up simply: Kingston has once again delivered on a simple budget premise, this time in a smaller form factor.

Kingston NV3 2230 Specifications

The Kingston NV3 2230, unlike many M.2 2230 SSDs, is available in a wide range of capacities: 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and eventually 4TB. Current pricing is at $50.23, $79.99, and $139.69. This pricing is competitive as one would expect from a Kingston NV3 drive. The drive is capable of hitting up to 6,000 / 5,000 MB/s for sequential reads and writes, with no specifications given for random read and write IOPS. We would expect a ceiling around 1,000K IOPS with this hardware.

These specifications are effectively identical to the full-length NV3, but there are changes worth noting. The first is that while the TBW is the same, the 2230 version of the drive has a five-year rather than a three-year warranty. This means the drive writes per day (DWPD) is actually lower on this drive, although still higher than the Crucial P310 2230. Write endurance shouldn’t be an issue with a drive of this type, but be aware of this distinction. Another difference is weight, with the 2280 NV3 being much heavier, as one would expect. The final difference is the flash: BiCS6 QLC on the 2280 and BiCS8 QLC on the 2230 NV3, a change we will dig into in more depth later.

Kingston NV3 2230 Software and Accessories

Kingston’s primary software offering is the Kingston SSD Manager, which is your typical SSD toolbox application. It’s designed to help you monitor disk health, verify properties of the drive, and upgrade the drive’s firmware. Kingston also has its own OEM version of Acronis True Image, which is used to back up, clone, and restore data. These two applications cover almost everything you’d need for a drive, although of course they are designed for Windows.

Kingston NV3 2230: A Closer Look

The Kingston NV3 is a single-sided drive at 2TB, which is pretty cool for an M.2 drive. We’ve seen that before, yes, but it still surprises you when you have such a tiny drive in your hands. Drives in this form factor benefit from being single-sided for compatibility. The Steam Deck, for one, is best with a single-sided drive for fitment, given motherboard components and the EMI shield. Other systems that can take longer drives, from 2242 to 2280, can meet this requirement at higher capacities more easily, as there is space on the board for between two and four NAND flash packages versus just one for 2230.

That brings one thing into question: Kingston has suggested a 4TB SKU is on the way for this drive, can it be single-sided? Currently, consumer flash is stacked at up to 16 dies per package, which, with 1Tb dies, means 2TB at the most.

32-stack technology is out there, but it's not reasonable for this type of device. Even 16-die packages can be challenging at higher speeds, as we saw with some 1TB TLC-based 2230 drives from Phison that had trouble in rare edge cases. The NV3 would have to either be double-sided or use 2Tb dies at 4TB. The latter is very possible – we may even see 2Tb dies at lower capacities – and it will be interesting to see what Kingston does.

Here we can see the controller, the Silicon Motion SM2268XT2, and the single NAND flash package. The XT2 is very similar to the original XT, the main difference being that the XT2 can handle up to 3,600 MT/s flash, while the XT is designed for 3,200 MT/s. There aren’t too many drives with either controller variant, the Kioxia BG6 probably being the most well-known one with the XT. The subtle change is similar to Phison’s “upgrade” from the E27T to the E29T – with flash support going from ONFi/Toggle 5.0 to 5.1 – with the latter being found on Micron’s 2600, a drive we may review in the near future. In practice, there’s no huge benefit to increasing the I/O rate as a four-channel PCIe 4.0 SSD controller can saturate the interface with just 2,400 MT/s, but enabling a higher rate can improve performance and/or efficiency in some cases.

The BiCS8 QLC flash is an upgrade over the regular NV3's BiCS6 QLC. There are improvements across the board as the newer architecture has better power efficiency and, in general, some of the best latency results we’ve seen. Specifically, the SanDisk WD Blue SN5100 is using this flash to very good effect, offering a TLC-like experience. It’s perfect for an M.2 2230 drive. One thing we can point out is that the 1TB and 2TB SKUs are slightly heavier than the 500GB SKU, which could mean heavier flash packages or more circuitry. It could also imply the use of 2Tb dies, now or in the future. However, it’s not uncommon for flash packages to maintain size and weight regardless of functional die count because fillers and dummy dies are used for uniformity.

None of that matters for the end user, but when looking at the weaker performance specifications for this drive and remembering that Kingston’s NV series of drives uses variable hardware, we must caution that the hardware might not remain what we’re reviewing today. Any new hardware must meet existing specifications, so even minor discrepancies can be a tell. Given the relatively low TBW and even lower DWPD than the 2280 variant, it’s likely this drive will only have QLC or lower-end TLC flash. The future 4TB SKU, if it comes, will be more standardized given the rarity. We think that, considering all these factors, the 500GB SKU should mostly be avoided unless it’s your only choice.

MORE: Best SSDs

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MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

Comparison Products

The Kingston NV3 2230 has its work cut out for it: it’s late to the M.2 2230 game with significant competition already in place. There are multiple tiers of competitors which we will briefly outline here so you can get a good feel for what drive is right for you. Before we get into that, we remind the reader that the Steam Deck is only PCIe 3.0, so the impact will be different. Power efficiency and latency results do transfer over at lower interface speeds, but conversely, less emphasis should be placed on sequential results.

The first tier is QLC-based drives with higher-end PCIe 4.0 performance. Right now, the main competitor there is the Crucial P310 2230. We scored that drive highly because it offers excellent performance and power efficiency, backed by reliable hardware. The NV3 2230 is rated for lower speeds, but our sample is using decent hardware. The issue here is that the specifications allow Kingston to use worse hardware down the line, as was the case with the full-length NV3.

The next tier, if you can call it that, is high-end 4.0 drives using TLC flash instead. This includes the Corsair MP600 Mini E27T variant and the PNY CS2342. These drives are going to be faster than the 2230 NV3 and P310 with higher TBW. However, these drives also cost more and will bump up against capacity limits with pricing more readily, especially if the NV3 gets 2Tb flash dies later on for 4TB. Generally, extra performance and write endurance aren’t necessary for where M.2 2230 drives are going to go, so that’s a secondary concern.

As some devices like the Steam Deck are PCIe 3.0, slower TLC-based drives like the WD Black SN770M can get you high performance with older hardware. This is also true of QLC drives such as the Sabrent Rocket Q4 and TeamGroup MP44S. At one time, all three of these drives – and similar ones from other brands – were pioneers of the form factor. Before they came out, options were limited to OEM drives and much older hardware. However, these drives can easily get the job done on a Steam Deck, though a 4.0 host will do better with one of the newer, faster drives listed above.

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 we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.

The number one use of an M.2 2230 drive today is probably gaming, thanks to the soaring popularity of portable, small-form-factor systems. Certainly, if you’re getting a drive for the Steam Deck, your primary interest is gaming. There are a few characteristics worth analyzing for this, the first and most important of which is game load time. This correlates with 3DMark performance to some degree, with the latency results giving the most understandable metric – nobody wants to wait for a game to load, especially in multiplayer.

What we see here is that drive bandwidth is the number one factor for score. The Rocket Q4 and MP44S are QLC-based, sure, but also limited to around 5 GB/s for reads. Yet the QLC-based P310 tops the list, and the NV3, also with QLC flash but at a lower 6 GB/s, is in the middle. This requires some explanation because QLC flash is inherently slower than TLC, but this is often not reflected in benchmarks or even real-world feel, as is the case here.

The first thing to keep in mind is that it’s commonly believed that games load with random, 4KB I/O at low queue depth. It’s true that low queue-depth transfers are the most common for gaming and consumer workloads, and that 4KB random read performance does correlate with storage responsiveness to a significant degree. However, games often rely on sequential reads, which incur higher I/O. This reduces any potential gap between TLC and QLC flash, not to mention it also eliminates the need for DRAM on a drive. In the future, with DirectStorage, this may change as it can require larger, random I/O with very high QD. We’re also not talking about niche scenarios, such as a mod-heavy Minecraft build or something along those lines.

The second thing to know is that QLC flash is designed with optimizations to improve read performance. More performance could be realized with DirectStorage, and some manufacturers even have software or driver-based optimizations – Solidigm’s Synergy 2.0 comes to mind. However, we’re talking about hardware or architectural optimization, with perhaps some assistance from firmware. Most of the I/O or access latency is at the level of the media, that is, the NAND flash. Improvements in other areas, such as the drive having DRAM and pathway optimization, or even just running the drive over CPU rather than PCH lanes, have a much smaller effect. Therefore, it pays to keep QLC’s plane count down with algorithms designed to boost everyday reads. There are a number of ways to do this, with the essential purpose being to reduce latency. This can be achieved by superior mixed I/O or program-interrupted read performance algorithms, by leveraging knowledge/feedback on expected voltage levels for superior start states, by leveraging data locality, and more.

What this means is that, as small as the difference is for game load times between one NVMe drive and another, it’s even smaller than you would expect given the flash type. QLC drives are perfectly suitable for read-heavy workloads, which include gaming. The difference between the 58µs Rocket Q4 and 39µs P310 is going to be really small, too. Where you’re going to see a real difference is how the drive handles edge cases with multiple I/O simultaneously, longer/larger updates, games with a million small files, a fuller drive, and so forth. In these cases, it’s worth jumping up to the NV3 from earlier QLC-based 2230 drives, since it’s faster and better prepared for those scenarios, but going with a TLC-based drive like the MP600 Mini (E27T) is even better.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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.

People do engage in productivity tasks with M.2 2230 drives, too, thanks to the form factor being used in the Microsoft Surface and other lightweight, portable computers. Some of them, including Lenovo’s Thinkpad, have sometimes opted for 2242 instead. 2242 potentially allows for higher capacity with double the NAND flash package potential. You can also extend 2230 drives to fit in 2242 slots at lower capacities. Most of these devices don’t allow for thicker, double-sided drives, which is why most 2230 and 2242 drives are single-sided. The relatively small space allowed for these drives can make cooling difficult, especially with the Deck’s M.2 SSD EMI shield, so that’s something to keep in mind when buying.

PCMark 10 is also bandwidth-bound, which means newer drives will perform better even if the hardware isn’t necessarily faster in many real-world tasks. Still, to add on to the examples we gave in the previous section, higher speeds can correspond to superior responsiveness. One reason for this is that higher-bandwidth drives will have flash rated at a higher I/O rate, which, aside from implying the flash is newer and therefore may have additional optimizations, means that the delay or latency is reduced. Again, this is tiny compared to the average latency of the flash. Having more bandwidth available also means some tasks can be completed more quickly, which in rare cases could reduce bottlenecks but more generally can improve power efficiency.

In this case, the QLC-based NV3 has no problem keeping up with the fast, TLC-based Black SN770M. This shows the power of BiCS8 QLC flash and the SM2268XT2 controller. The argument could be made that none of this really matters for Microsoft Word or YouTube in Chrome, but with pricing being an important component for drive selection, it’s worth looking at the experience you get from the drive. We all know someone who keeps more tabs open than is sane – and that someone might be you – and if your computer is not CPU or RAM-bound, your storage can be a bottleneck in terms of responsiveness. This is even more true if you have many apps and/or games open, are doing content creation simultaneously, Discord is lagging your GPU acceleration, and so on.

Why would you get a less responsive drive for nearly the same price? Why shun QLC flash – which is used on the P310, the dominant winner in this test – when it can actually be faster in everyday use than many TLC-based drives? Know your workload before you buy.

Steam Deck Testing — Gaming, KDiskMark, and Temperature

The Steam Deck is not the only portable gaming system in town, but it was the first and most popular to take M.2 2230 SSDs. While some systems have moved on to fit 2280 length drives, 2230 remains popular for many systems and such drives will work fine in longer slots with the proper standoff or extender. The Deck operates in PCIe 3.0 mode for its SSD which limits maximum bandwidth but that has less of an impact on responsiveness/latency and the Deck is still useful for gauging drive temperature and power efficiency.

Our current testing for the Deck involves analyzing game load times for some popular games. This is probably the most important metric for gamers, but the difference between one SSD and another can be small. We also use KDiskMark, a CrystalDiskMark-like substitute that uses the flexible I/O (FIO) tester instead of diskspd for its underlying benchmarks. We also check the drive’s maximum temperature during this test.

The tests in this section are run under the stock Arch-based SteamOS Linux platform but our other tests are conducted as per our normal reviews, using Windows. Many portable gaming systems today use or can use Windows with multi-boot also as an option. This testing section is instead designed to give an idea of Linux performance, which does involve the use of Proton.

As we’ve stated many times, the difference in game load times from one NVMe drive to another is usually minimal. There will always be some outliers, and, additionally, it can still be informative to look at smaller differences as the games being tested have distinct loading patterns. Let’s expand on this a little bit, as gaming is a primary target workload for M.2 2230 SSDs.

We’ve said before that BiCS8 flash can have advantages in latency, particularly 4KB random read latency, yet we see the NV3 is dead last in Elden Ring. Elden Ring’s level loading is, in fact, almost all sequential, with much of the I/O being larger than a typical 16KB page. This means it favors drives with more bandwidth, like the P310 and CS2342. The P310 uses newer flash than the CS2342, which might give it an edge. Larger I/O can transfer faster, and the same amount of data takes fewer transfers in comparison to smaller I/O, which can make analysis counterintuitive to the uninitiated, especially as SSDs are designed to get maximum performance with parallelization.

That’s more difficult to achieve with a low queue depth. We test both random and sequential performance at QD1, which we’ve stated tends to reflect real-world transfers pretty well. This also applies to games where your average transfer is effectively QD1. Some multiplayer games might have smaller, more random transfers at higher queue depths, though we don’t suspect many people are competitive gaming on a portable gaming system. More realistically, we’d be looking at edge cases – a very full drive updating a game that’s immediately played – where a TLC-based drive like the CS2342 is probably a safer bet. Or maybe you do have a majorly modded game, in which case we would again lean towards TLC flash. For everything else, the NV3 is plenty fast.

We also test in KDiskMark to give CDM-like results. This also shows how the Steam Deck in particular handles I/O. Let’s be honest, it’s not a super-powerful system, and therefore it often looks last-gen on this test. In fac,t you could definitely get by with a Gen3 SSD, but we would recommend against that. Gen4 drives have newer hardware that’s often much more efficient, which is easier on the system. The only exception might be the OEM BC711 from SK hyni,x which has the same hardware as the Gold P31 with embedded DRAM, something rare in M.2 2230 drives. It can also be found in M.2 2242 inside the Tube T31 and Beetle X31 for those willing to shuck. Otherwise, we reiterate that the Gen 4 NV3 is more than enough.

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.

File transfers are probably the most common storage workload that you’ll do, at least the most common one that will push the drive to some extent. Our DiskBench methodology reflects a real-world transfer. Usually, this will fit inside the drive’s pSLC cache, meaning you don’t get an idea of how the drive performs in its native mode – see our Write Saturation section for a more detailed breakdown. The fact is, most of everything you do with an SSD should fit inside the cache. Your operating system is also using system memory or RAM to cache data. Caching is useful in both cases because it allows smaller writes to be combined in a way that improves performance and reduces drive wear.

This is another case where drives with higher bandwidth will score better. This is, in part, due to the fact that bandwidth can improve even in cases where you’re not getting anywhere near the theoretical maximum. That maximum is designed for large I/O with lots of queue depth, but a faster bus or I/O rate can trickle down to improve performance even for regular I/O. For that reason, a drive like the NV3 can outperform the Rocket Q4 and MP44S in this test, and the P310 can outshine everything. The P310 uses the same controller as the MP600 Mini (E27T) and QLC flash rather than TLC, yet it scores higher. One reason for this is that the MP600 Mini has a very small pSLC cache, and another is that the P310’s QLC flash is of a higher generation. The former is more impactful, but don’t be misled by this result. The MP600 Mini will be faster in many cases.

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.

It should be immediately apparent that the NV3 has some problems in ATTO. The read chart indicates that the drive’s performance is well below the competition’s. This is almost certainly due to the controller. Our NV3 (2280) review had the same controller but with BiCS6 QLC flash, which is inferior to the BiCS8 on the 2230 version. That drive has the same issue, and for that matter, we see some similarities with the Adata Legend 960 and Legend 960 Max. Those drives are using a different SMI controller, the SM2264, so this seems to be an SMI problem. No such issue exists for the SM2508 so we’re guessing we can narrow this down to a Gen 4 problem. We do, in fact, see reduced sequential read performance from the drive in CDM, too, so this is a weakness of the hardware. It’s not make-or-break. Sequential write performance is less important, but the NV3 performs as expected with QLC flash and the rated speed.

Random write latency is less good. Luckily, this isn’t a huge deal. Random writes are designed to be coalesced or combined through caching, which can happen in system memory or SSD volatile memory, but even if it hits non-volatile medium, it’s pSLC rather than QLC. These writes will be combined in the cache before being written to the native QLC flash. Arguably, you will sometimes notice performance gaps here from, say, large Windows or game updates, but this should be hidden by caching unless the drive is very full. The NV3’s read latency is excellent, matching the P310's, which also uses QLC flash, and within reach of some of the best 2230 drives. We have no complaints about that.

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, which is 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 as well as the steady state write performance.

The 2TB NV3 (223) writes in the pSLC cache mode at 5.77 GB/s for over 92 seconds. This is a massive cache, using all of the flash available in the single-bit mode. As the drive is converted from 4-bit QLC flash, that means the cache is wholly one-fourth the maximum capacity. This capacity can include flash not exposed to the user or OS, and given the normal binary-to-decimal translation, this means that the 533GB cache seen here is possible.

The drive is then forced to wait for data to be moved from the cache to the native flash, which is laborious and slow – this drive manages just under 300 MB/s when looking at the steady state average. While this is poor by today’s standards, it’s actually not that bad for QLC flash. It’s fast enough for any portable device that relies on gigabit Ethernet or a wireless connection and is plenty fast to match memory cards, too. External storage at 10 Gbps or higher will be bottlenecked by the USB connection. It’s true that this is simplifying things, but it does mean that most 2230-accepting devices won’t have a problem with this potential slowdown, but faster ones coming down the pipeline may be better served by faster storage solutions.

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. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

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.

Power efficiency is a shining point for the NV3. It’s the most efficient drive in our lineup and by a significant amount at that. Considering that we have the fastest QLC-based and the two fastest TLC-based 2230 SSDs on the list, the NV3 is in a good place as a compromise between performance and power efficiency. We do point out that this is in our Windows testing and that the max or peak power draw isn’t anything special.

That said, this drive will be very efficient, reducing power consumption on your battery-powered devices. Is this amount significant in daily use? No, but over the device's lifetime, this could add up when considering battery wear. Further, the NV3 runs cooler as a resul,t which reduces the likelihood of throttling – especially as devices age and get clogged up – and mitigates general wear. QLC flash is perfect for this kind of SSD, as the performance you need is there, and you can get the best cost per GB in a form factor that normally makes higher capacities challenging. If the drive runs cooler, as we would expect from BiCS8 QLC flash in particular, that’s just an added bonus.

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.

Kingston NV3 2230 Bottom Line

This one was difficult to grade. We definitely think the NV3 has some advantages over older M.2 2230 SSDs, but it just doesn’t hit all the marks like the Crucial P310 does. The bright spots: excellent power efficiency, good all-around performance, and pretty good pricing as well. The last one is probably the most important since this is a QLC flash drive. With QLC, you’re going for capacity as well as price, and in terms of GB per $, the NV3 is unsurpassed at 2TB. However, the P310 is only $11 more at the time of review, and it’s a more complete package. If you want more performance, you jump up to the TLC-based WD Black SN770M. This is an oversimplification, but right now that’s the general approach for 2TB.

If we drop to 1TB, and to be clear, we don’t think you should get a QLC-based drive at any capacity lower than that, the NV3 is still the best value. For $10 more right now, you can get the Sabrent Rocket 4 2230 if you want TLC flash. The P310 is also in that range and is a better drive on paper than the NV3, so you have three good options there. We think all the drives listed so far, with the SN770M as an exception, are power-efficient and run cool enough on any 2230 host. Battery savings are not a real factor, as the difference will be small, but in terms of longevity, we do think getting a more efficient drive can be worthwhile. We don’t think the use of QLC flash is an issue here, and therefore, the NV3 is a good choice.

We should also touch on use cases not involving the Deck, which is limited to PCIe 3.0 speeds, which makes the 2230 drive price more relevant. There are portable PCIe 4.0 systems, but 2230 is also useful for small-form-factor systems, HTPCs, mini PCs, and the like. Power efficiency is usually king in these use cases, making the NV3 2230 incredibly effective given its low price. This would be even more the case if the 4TB model ever comes to light. You can always use the drive in a regular slot later with an M.2 extender, if needed. It’s not a bad investment.

It’s hard to dislike the NV3 because it uses excellent flash and a reasonable controller. However, we have to lower its score further due to history. Kingston’s NV series of drives is notorious for hardware swaps, and that’s one reason the specifications are so modest. This risk keeps the drive from being a champion in our minds, but we emphasize that the NV3 2230 is about price before all else. The fact that our sample is also super efficient, with the best QLC flash available right now, is just icing on the cake. If that fits your priorities, then this drive is probably the best one on the market right now. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for TLC flash, maximum performance, or high endurance, then it’s not the best option. It’s perfect for the Deck, but for faster and future hardware, the NV3 2230 will eventually be left behind.

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Kingston Technology has announced its first cable-free SSD. It will hope it has doubled the chances of its debut product getting a warm reception by fitting dual captive USB-A and –C connectors, one at either end of this high-performance memory stick. Kingston's Dual Portable SSD Storage Solution products are available right now. The firm’s handy USB 3.2 Gen 2 dual-interface SSD thumb drives are priced between $97 for a 512GB, and $239 for a whopping 2TB model. We might as well also mention, the Goldilocks 1TB model is $144. But, whichever you choose, they all boast “Up to 1,050MB/s read, 950MB/s write” speeds.

• Buy the 512GB Kingston Dual Portable SSD on Amazon
• Buy the 1TB Kingston Dual Portable SSD on Amazon
• Buy the 2TB Kingston Dual Portable SSD on Amazon

The recommended use case for these compact, flexibly interfaced drives is as an affordable, reliable, portable solution for data back-ups and transfers. Specifically, Kingston reckons the Dual Portable SSDs are a good choice “for large files, high-res photos and 4K videos.” It looks like a humble flash drive, albeit with a compact, durable metal casing, but this Kingston offers much better performance than a budget alternative might deliver.

“More and more consumers are looking to take their data into their own hands,” said Liny Cheliyan, Business Manager - Prosumer Flash and SSD Kingston EMEA. “Now with the convenience of Kingston’s Dual Portable SSD, users can do just that and easily transfer, share, or back up their important files across a variety of USB-A and USB-C devices.”

In addition to the dual-interface flexibility, the broad OS support of the Kingston Dual Portable SSDs will be welcomed by those carting their precious data between systems, places, and platforms. Checking the official specs table data, above, you can see users can easily transfer data between diverse platforms - as long as they sport either a USB-A or USB-C connector (or have an adaptor).

These devices look pretty durable, too, which is desirable for easily portable objects that may find themselves rattling around in bags, pockets, or worse. We'd have liked to see some kind of water/dust resistance added to the specs, but the cold/heat durability is welcome.

Kingston is giving buyers of its class as a premium portable flash solution a five-year warranty with free tech support.

It was only a matter of time before Kingston updated its flagship SSD, promising two times the bandwidth with improvements across the board for performance and power efficiency. Things are kept simple with G5 added to the Fury Renegade name to emphasize that this is the PCIe 5.0 incarnation, and we appreciate Kingston keeping it simple in the age of convoluted product model labeling. Kingston keeps it simple with the drive itself, too, playing it safe with fast hardware in a streamlined package. This is a drive that will handle anything you throw at it without any unnecessary fluff. Even the label is practical, taking a cue from the KC3000's simple but effective design.

If we have a complaint, it’s that the drive came in hot with high pricing compared to the competition. This is a complicated push-pull situation: high demand has made the NAND and SSD markets challenging while simultaneously vertically-integrated manufacturers like Crucial, WD/SanDisk, and Samsung have been pricing aggressively. The Fury Renegade G5 can’t really offer anything special over the competition, so it will have to rely on careful pricing and its own name. After all, Kingston is a massive memory brand with a global presence that has the flexibility to attack pricing at volume.

Kingston fans will have no problem picking this one up if they’re looking for a high-end drive. It’s also a decent alternative to other drives out there, so if it has better availability in some regions, it might become a de facto pick. We would probably lean towards the Crucial T710 at 1TB, and the Samsung 9100 Pro remains the pick for high capacity with its 8TB launch. The SanDisk WD Black SN8100 is good everywhere else and will also have an 8TB model by the end of the year. That leaves the Fury Renegade G5 fighting at 2TB and 4TB for your attention.

Kingston Fury Renegade G5 Specifications

The Kingston Fury Renegade G5 is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, with review-time pricing at $164.95, $239.95, and $449.95, respectively. These prices are not competitive because both the SanDisk WD Black SN8100 and Samsung 9100 Pro are less expensive and belong to the same class of SSDs. The Lexar NM1090 Pro can be found for even less than those, although it’s not quite as fast. There is also the Crucial T710 that directly competes with the Fury Renegade G5 within the same ballpark of pricing, and while we might lean towards the latter as it is using BiCS8 flash – we’ve found it to be more responsive and efficient than Micron’s – the pricing is close enough to make the Kingston a tough sell.

In some regions of the globe, the Kingston might be more competitively priced or may have better availability, though, and we may also see prices align more realistically in due time.

No surprises with the performance: the Fury Renegade G5 can hit up to 14,800 / 14,000 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 2,200K / 2,200K random read and write IOPS. Peak performance is reached at 4TB, while a drive like the T710, which uses flash that has more planes so it can interleave better at lower capacities, peaks at 2TB. We’ve included power numbers in our table here, as we did in our recent SanDisk WD Blue SN5100 review, as they are provided by the manufacturer. Looking at those, the 4TB adds significant overhead, which might make it less desirable for laptops, although this is based on maximum power draw rather than average usage.

Kingston backs the Fury Renegade G5 with a five-year warranty. This is nothing special, but the endurance – the amount of writes covered under warranty – is exceptional. 1,000TB of writes per TB capacity is 67% more than the typical 600TB. This sets the drive apart for those that look at TBW when buying a drive. While normally we would say that TBW should not be a big factor in your buying decision, there are cases where it’s nice to know that quality flash is being used, and a high-end drive designed for high throughput is one of those.

Kingston Fury Renegade G5 Software and Accessories

Kingston has two direct downloads available for its customers: the Kingston SSD Manager and Acronis True Image for Kingston. The SSD manager is your typical “toolbox” application used to check drive health, verify drive information, and engage drive features. It’s also used to update the drive firmware which is important as Kingston is one of the few companies to offer an update for the Phison E18’s performance issues for both its KC3000 and PCIe 4.0 Fury Renegade SSDs. True Image needs no introduction as it’s a typical OEM software package used to image and backup data/drives for migrating data on new drive installations.

Kingston Fury Renegade G5:: A Closer Look

The Fury Renegade G5 is single-sided at 2TB and, in fact, at all capacities, which is a bonus. Single-sided drives have higher compatibility and can be easier to cool. The drive comes with a heat-spreading label, which can help cool the drive in setups lacking space for a heatsink. You may also add a heatsink to this drive with or without removing the label if space is available. While the early adopter PCIe 5.0 drives required a heatsink for proper operation, newer drives like the Fury Renegade G5 are less restrictive.

While we do think that having a heatsink option would be nice, experience with newer motherboards – and you will have a newer motherboard if you’re buying a high-end PCIe 5.0 drive – suggests that you will almost always have a heatsink provided for at least the primary M.2 slot. The drive is thankfully cool-running enough that it won’t need a heatsink in many cases, too.

The 2TB Renegade G5 has an SSD controller, a single DRAM package, and two NAND flash packages. A keen eye might notice that there’s no PMIC and that the PCB is relatively unadorned. This would be due to the SM2508 ASIC having an integrated power management controller. It’s one reason this hardware is so efficient relative to earlier solutions, and intelligent power management that can toggle blocks/modules as needed means you also get lower idle draw. It’s easy to think that SSDs haven’t progressed that much, but they are actually getting more complex as time goes on.

The drive’s external volatile memory or DRAM, used primarily for metadata caching, is LPDDR4. This is more efficient than standard DDR4 – hence LP or “low power” – with the potential to take up less space and provide more throughput. Physical space is important for SSDs, given the relatively small M.2 2280 and shorter form factors that SSDs use, but power consumption and cost are more important factors. Throughput or bandwidth is also not as important as the bigger benefit for a look-up table would manifest as lower latency, which can be optimized by running the DRAM at a lower speed. The impact on the user is minimal either way, but we would say LPDDR4 is preferable to DDR4 on what is intended to be a relatively power-efficient PCIe 5.0 platform.

The flash being used is Kioxia BiCS8 TLC, which, in our opinion, is excellent and preferable to Micron’s in most cases. We have discussed the technical aspects of this flash in previous reviews, such as the one for the Sandisk WD Black SN8100. It’s power-efficient and tends to have excellent random read performance, which is all-important for having a responsive everyday experience. It doesn’t win all the battles, but is preferable to most other flash on the market, such as the 232-Layer Micron and YMTC TLC flash found on some competing or older drives.

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Comparison Products

We have a diverse set of competing drives. The QLC drive of the hour is the Crucial P310, a more recent release that threatens to take market share from existing budget drives. The Kingston NV3 is a stalwart opponent in this arena, typically featuring QLC flash, even though our release sample used TLC. Technically, the P310 is replacing the popular P3 Plus, which uses the same hardware as the Corsair MP600 Core XT. The FA200, like the P310, is capable of pumping out more bandwidth, which can translate to improved overall performance.

We then look at drives that share the FA200’s controller but have different flash memory. This includes the Addlink A93 with YMTC TLC flash, and the Klevv CRAS C925 with rarer SK hynix TLC. We also have the Inland TN470, which shows off Phison’s comparable E27T controller. These drives are all roughly in the same class and can perform similarly; however, price and flash capacity must factor into your decision. QLC flash might yield the same performance for what you intend to do with the drive, but if you’re not saving money, then why not go with TLC?

We also want to demonstrate how this drive compares to some of the better PCIe 4.0 drives. We would generally recommend the Samsung 990 Pro, but the 4TB 990 Pro is specifically the best drive to compare, as it’s likely the best 4TB PCIe 4.0 drive on the market. To save money, many people opt to keep the DRAM but switch to an older platform, such as Phison’s E18. The Netac NV7000 is a fair representative of this controller in a mature state. The E18 remains a popular choice for “budget” capacity – we mention the MSI M480 Pro in our conclusion – despite being a higher-end platform on paper. The E18 has recently been known to experience a read performance issue in some cases, but firmware is being or will be released to address this issue.

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 we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.

Want a killer drive for your high-end gaming setup? The Fury Renegade G5 would be on our short list. The Black SN8100 scores a bit better, probably due to SanDisk’s firmware optimization. Sometimes this optimization might only appear in benchmarks like this, so some caution is warranted. To be on the safe side, we would put the Renegade G5 right up against the Black SN8100 in a real-world contest, but at the same price, we’d lean towards the latter. SanDisk’s inherited WD Dashboard is pretty solid, so that’s an extra edge.

The T710, which uses Micron rather than Kioxia TLC flash, comes in third place. Micron’s flash is technically more advanced as it has more layers – 276 against 218 – but historically speaking BiCS has trailed in layer count but made things work in other ways. In the past, this might have been due to capacity – the 8TB E18-based drives still use BiCS5 instead of the 176-Layer Micron flash with lower launch capacities, or in cost. With BiCS8 on the Black SN8100 and Fury Renegade G5, the advantages are two-fold: the flash is using a power-efficient architecture, and by staying with a four-plane design, Kioxia/SanDisk has managed a decent improvement to random read performance.

Micron’s flash, on the other hand, can achieve higher parallelization at any capacity as it uses a six-plane design. This means six-way internal interleaving is possible per die, rather than four-way. As a result, the T710 generally has better throughput, and this is especially meaningful at 1TB. What does this mean for gaming? Well, in our opinion, you’re probably better served by going with a BiCS8-based drive to shave off every nanosecond, even if it means games might transfer over slightly slower. This objectively puts the Black SN8100 and Fury Renegade G5 into a class of their own. If you’re going to go all-out and spend money on a PCIe 5.0 drive for gaming, you might as well get the very fastest one.

Then again, if you’re budget-conscious we would say any drive will do. The SanDisk WD Black SN7100 is a good choice because it’s well-rounded and relatively inexpensive, especially at larger capacities. If you’re a Samsung fan and want a PCIe 5.0 drive, the 9100 Pro will do just fine. And if you’re rocking an older PCIe 5.0 drive, you probably won’t notice the difference with an upgrade.

On the other hand, the advantage over PCIe 4.0 drives – even relatively high-end ones like the original Fury Renegade – might make you consider a jump up to the G5. After all, your old Fury Renegade will make for a great secondary drive. You might want to look at a drive with the best TB/$ ratio in that case, though, where compromising with an E26-based drive like the Rocket 5 or an SM2508-based drive with older flash – like the Predator GM9000 – might make more sense.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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.

PCMark shows the application side of things in daily Windows usage. Its results are more important for those who use their system for work, content creation, virtualization, server/workstation tasks, and more. PCIe 5.0 drives make more sense for such a user who will undoubtedly have a larger budget and a need for fast storage. It’s pretty clear that the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives blow away any PCIe 4.0 drive when push comes to shove.

Once again, we see SanDisk’s optimization giving great results with the Black SN8100. The only drive that can top it is the one built on Phison’s upcoming E28 SSD controller. Although we said above that Micron’s flash might have throughput benefits, the fact is that Phison has put a lot of effort into getting record-breaking performance out of the E28 while using BiCS8 or any flash for that matter. This hints at a “best of both worlds” approach that means it might be worth waiting if you want a penultimate PCIe 5.0 storage solution. That said, the Black SN8100 is very capable, is available today, and has already been discounted significantly. If the Fury Renegade G5 can undercut that price, it can remain relevant as a safe alternative.

We also think the 9100 Pro and T710 are close enough to consider, the former especially if you want an 8TB solution. We thought that the $999.99 price tag on the 8TB 9100 Pro was not unreasonable, but it was 25% off during the recent Prime Day sale. 50% more than the 8TB WD Black SN850X for double the throughput? That sounds like a good deal for enthusiasts. If you don’t need 8TB, though, you owe it to yourself to be more discerning.

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. In our 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.

We recommend using a PCIe 4.0 drive for your PS5. A PCIe 5.0 drive like the Fury Renegade G5 is overkill and unnecessary. We still run this test as we’ve discovered anomalies in the past through its results and, some day, PCIe 5.0 drives might end up around the same price point as PCIe 4.0. Consoles can have a long life, and we want to accommodate future readers.

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.

In DiskBench, we again see that Phison is very serious about coming in first place when it comes to showing off what a PCIe 5.0 drive can do. We expect even better things with retail products, assuming some firmware optimization will be implemented. The Black SN8100 and Fury Renegade G5 both perform admirably, too. In fact, even the slower PCIe 5.0 drives, like the MP700 Elite, do great here. That drive is only rated for 10 GB/s or so, and yet it handles itself pretty well, and its BiCS8 TLC flash and E31T controller mean it's efficient, too. The widest gap here is between it and the PCIe 4.0 Fury Renegade, which, for its time, was a fast and popular drive.

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.

We would want and expect the Fury Renegade G5 to follow the Black SN8100 closely in ATTO. For the most part, it does, with some minor variations at larger block sizes for reads. The Phison E28 prototype, for its part, stands out with fantastic read performance in this test. We reiterate that Phison really wants to win in that arena, as most consumer workloads are read-heavy at a low queue depth. We would expect retail drives based on the E28 to be the fastest drives around, but that also means they will probably have a higher price tag. This is another area where we think the Black SN8100 or 9100 Pro are good enough that if they win on price, they are probably the way to go. That goes for the Fury Renegade G5, too.

If we look at reads on the logarithmic scale, we see that the GM9000 struggles at lower block sizes. It’s fine at 4KiB and up, which is realistically all that matters for consumer use. You’ll be working with the default 4KiB cluster size on Windows, and SSDs operate with 4KiB logical pages in mind. Some drives can be formatted for 4KiB sectors, too. However, we still have to point out that the drive’s weakness is that it shows a potential drawback to the “budget” SM2508 drives that are getting by with older flash. These drives ultimately make more sense at high capacities and for storage with fast transfers, so generally you won’t be dealing with smaller files. If you want the best responsiveness for your primary drive, though, it’s probably worth jumping up to the T710, Black SN8100, 9100 Pro, Fury Renegade G5, or E28-based drives.

CrystalDiskMark paints a better picture of the raw differences in sequential performance. Real-world transfers are often at QD1, and again, Phison is pushing the E28 to dominate here with reads. The 9100 Pro has a good showing, too. You again suffer for going with the GM9000. Lower-end PCIe 5.0 drives and any PCIe 4.0 drive will fall further behind. Once you have enough queue depth, though, the differences between the high-end PCIe 5.0 drives disappear. Gaps for sequential writes are less significant, but again, the PCIe 4.0 Fury Renegade stands no chance with the PCIe 4.0 interface limitation.

BiCS8 TLC flash is the current champion for random read latency for 4KiB transfers at QD1. Enthusiasts often look at this result to get an idea of drive responsiveness. The high-end PCIe 5.0 drives with that flash – the Black SN8100, Phison E28 ES, and Fury Renegade G5 – come out on top. The T710 is close enough that you aren’t giving up much by picking it over other drives, except for maybe the Black SN8100, which has unique optimizations. The BiCS8 flash also does great with QD1 4K write latency with the E28 ES, MP700 Elite, and Fury Renegade G5 at the top, and the SN8100 not far behind. The T710 is effectively in that class, too.

We mentioned previously that the BiCS8 four-plane design can give it an edge with latency. This is also true of a lot of QLC flash we’ve seen, which has been kept four-plane with optimizations to improve 4KiB performance and reads, especially. The media or flash remains a hard limit for potential performance improvements, but there are techniques that can improve access time. For instance, since flash is often written in a superpage — across all planes of a die at a similar offset — with some type of locality, meaning data that share characteristics are organized in a logical way, addressing can be simplified to improve multi-plane read operations.

Reads don’t require acknowledgement like writes do, either, so the read command sequence can be streamlined to further reduce latency. One potential source of higher read latency is errors, which are more prone to occur with modern multi-bit flash and QLC specifically. However, the controller can intelligently and proactively adjust voltage thresholds before reading to avoid a read retry. Read recovery and reads that interrupt program cycles can also be handled intelligently, to name only a few general areas of potential improvement, while ignoring writes. Managing this on the controller and flash level gets more complicated as density and plane count increase.

Six-plane QLC flash is on the way, which is expected because we’ve had six-plane TLC flash for a while, and QLC needs to keep up in both density and throughput. More planes mean more complexity for optimization. These improvements may come to QLC first in part because the relative gain is higher, but also because QLC demand is rising in the enterprise. We’re translating lessons learned from QLC flash to TLC flash. That’s relevant to any PCIe 5.0 SSD discussion because there really are differences between the Kioxia and Micron flash that you should be aware of when picking a high-end drive. This gap melts away a bit at 8TB because Samsung is also using four-plane flash and the 8TB Black SN8100 will, too, not to mention the fact that the E28 is using four-plane BiCS8 so far as well. At lower capacities, though, this decision can impact the performance profile of the drive, making the T710 potentially better at 1TB. Another potential trade-off would be cost which is dependent on many factors including yield. For the end user this could translate to some savings, but it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth it.

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, which is 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 as well as the steady state write performance.

The Kingston Fury Renegade G5 has a somewhat unusual write profile, starting off by writing at 13.1 GB/s for just 11 seconds. This is in the temporary cache mode and resembles some of the static pSLC responses we’ve seen in the past. Static pSLC is taken out of non-user flash, so it is limited in size but always available, which means it usually has high endurance. While older drives like the WD Black SN750 only had static cache, drives today have dynamic cache that can be much larger, either alone or in tandem with static cache. WD’s/SanDisk’s nCache and Samsung’s TurboWrite are examples of caching systems with both static and dynamic. We know that the Fury Renegade G5 doesn’t really have static here because that first mode is far too large, and further, static pSLC is often slower than dynamic because the higher-endurance wordlines often used for it have the trade-off of slower programming time due to how dies are etched.

Why do we bring that up? Well, we have seen a cache response like this before on Maxio MAP1602-based drives, such as the recently reviewed Acer FA200. We posited in that and previous reviews that this early burst of speed can be static-like as a way to handle smaller random writes from the host/user. We also know this tends to be controller-specific rather than flash-specific because here we see the T710 follows the Fury Renegade G5’s pattern. This is interesting because it suggests extra optimization is present to improve the user experience. This will likely continue with newer hardware as time goes on, providing an additional, if minor, reason to upgrade.

The 2TB Fury Renegade G5 continues to write for another 43 seconds in pSLC at 12.3 GB/s for a 670GB cache. This is about as big as the cache can be when converting 2TB of 3-bit TLC flash into a 1-bit pSLC mode. This is very aggressive, which some users might like and others maybe not so much. It means incredible burst write performance, which is particularly nice with a fast PCIe 5.0 drive. However, it also means that sustained write performance will suffer.

The drive hits a TLC mode after this, writing at 2.56 GB/s for 45 seconds. This is reasonably fast, but we know it can do better, with 4 GB/s not being impossible. However, because this drive has such a large cache, it is limited in what it can do. It’s trying to balance writing directly to the native TLC flash with evacuation of the pSLC cache to TLC. Eventually, this becomes untenable because the drive needs more space to handle incoming data, and the drive is forced to wait for data migration. This folding mode has writes averaging around 1.545 GB/s. This isn’t bad and matches the 9100 Pro, but we’ve seen better things from the SN8100 and T710. The Rocket 5 is the fastest drive we’ve seen here, even with its older hardware, and in fact, even the original Fury Renegade can muster more performance. Again, this is due to the manufacturer's decision to emphasize peak and burst write performance.

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. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

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.

We’ve come to expect almost crazy levels of power efficiency with newer drives and the Fury Renegade G5 doesn’t disappoint. It’s very close to the SN8100 and MP700 Elite. The E28 might end up better, but we’ll have to check retail drives to be sure. It’s not too relevant because, frankly, the Fury Renegade G5 is efficient enough to be used in laptops and HTPCs with just the heatspreading label. Our main point of caution is that the drive is rated for 9W peak, but this really only applies to the 4TB SKU. If your intention is to get it at 4TB for a laptop, adding some additional cooling – like a low-profile heatsink or thermal padding – might be wise if you use the laptop for heavier work.

The drive only reached 52°C during our testing, which is very cool indeed. The label does help to spread heat a little. The controller will be the hottest point on this drive, so wicking away heat from its surface is sufficient to prevent throttling with good airflow.

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.

Kingston Fury Renegade G5 Bottom Line

We like the Kingston Fury Renegade G5. A lot. It’s a definite upgrade over the original Fury Renegade and its KC3000 sibling that just feels natural. In part, that’s because this is a no-frills, single-sided drive that performs well without acting like a space heater. Kingston has all the software angles covered and even throws in a higher-than-standard write endurance warranty. This makes the Fury Renegade G5 feel like a safe choice in a market that has so many alternatives and pretenders. Does it have the name recognition of the WD Black SN8100 or Samsung 9100 Pro? No, and you’ll have to look at those to get an 8TB drive, but anybody who has had a good experience with Kingston drives or will settle for the name – and that’s easier to do in other regions of the globe – can safely rely on it for a solid storage experience.

We don’t really consider lower-end drives a threat to the Fury Renegade G5. If all you want is an inexpensive games drive, a PCIe 4.0 SSD will get the job done. This one is for higher performance and faster transfers. Sure, a mid-range PCIe 5.0 drive like the MP700 Elite will run great in a laptop or in any PCIe 4.0 slot if you want power efficiency and some future-proofing, but you know deep down you’re not reaching the full potential of the PCIe 5.0 interface. Older E26-based drives, on the other hand, run very hot. Newer alternatives like the Predator GM9000 can save you some money but still make more sense as a high-end secondary drive. You simply want the goods for your daily driver. The Fury Renegade G5 can deliver.

Its real competition, aside from the aforementioned Black SN8100 and 9100 Pro, is the Crucial T710. It’s a drive that performs well even at 1TB, with a well-known name behind it. At 2TB and 4TB, though, the Fury Renegade G5 comes into its own and has the advantage of superior read latency. We think that makes it more attractive than the T710. As long as Kingston can get a handle on 2TB and 4TB pricing, it should be good to go for now. In the future, we think E28-based drives will give it a run for its money, but we assume such drives will carry a premium. That means that the Fury Renegade G5 will probably end up being a good compromise, and Kingston knows it.

One thing to add here is a brief discussion about flash quality. SMI’s SM2508 has been a fantastic platform for drives, but there is some motivation to keep costs down. You can absolutely get by with lower-tier media-grade flash – we saw such flash end up in some E18 drives with the standard TBW – but we would expect that more from generic brands and drives with older flash. Still, Kingson’s elevated TBW on the Fury Renegade G5 gives us peace of mind as we can be relatively certain it’ll be paired with quality flash. This isn’t usually a huge concern, but with the market the way it is, it’s worth being a discerning buyer. If reliability is a factor for you, then this drive is certainly a strong choice.

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Multiple manufacturers of enthusiast-grade DRAM modules demonstrated compression-attached memory CAMM2 modules at Computex 2025, indicating their interest in this form factor. However, none of the manufacturers are confident that these DDR5 modules will hit the market as they are unsure when motherboard makers will release suitable platforms.

We saw CAMM2 memory modules from G.Skill, Kingston, and TeamGroup at the trade show in Taipei, Taiwan. Modules from G.Skill and TeamGroup come with elevated data transfer rates (DDR5-10,000 and DDR5-8000, respectively). Additionally, TeamGroup equipped its CAMM2 module with heat spreaders and addressable RGB LEDs, indicating that they are aimed at enthusiasts. G.Skill even demonstrated an overclocked version of its DDR5-10,000 CAMM2 module with shrunk timings.

Kingston demonstrated two versions of its enthusiast-grade Fury-branded CAMM2 modules (just like G.Skill) but did not publish the speed bins it plans to support. Additionally, while Kingston partnered with Gigabyte's Aorus for the Z890 Aorus Tachyon Ice CAMM2 motherboard, its advertising materials state that its Fury Impact DDR5 CAMM2 modules are "ideal for notebook and mobile workstation users."

However, demonstrations of compression attached memory modules at Computex were not limited to CAMM2. SK hynix demonstrated its LPDDR5X-based SOCAMM2 modules as well, though this form-factor is for now specific to Nvidia's Grace Blackwell platforms. Several makers of modules — including Micron and SK hynix's affiliate Klevv — also showcased LPCAMM2 modules mainly aimed at compact and mobile systems, which highlights that the form-factor is gradually becoming more widespread, and these makers envision aftermarket demand for them.

We're now on Day Two of our Computex 2024 coverage, and the news isn't showing any signs of slowing down. Today, we have some insights from Intel on its next-generation Xeon 6 processors, which will be available in low-power/efficient and high-performance variants to take on AMD's potent EPYC family. There are new power supplies from Seasonic and Super Flower (including a 2800W monster) and a massive new 57-inch Dual 4K monitor from Cooler Master. 

Intel's Xeon 6 processors are on deck to challenge AMD's EPYC family Earlier this week, AMD announced its new 3nm Turin-based EPYC processors, which are available in up to 192-core configurations. Today, however, is Intel's turn to shine with its Xeon 6 processors. The Xeon 6 family will be split into families, with the first being "Sierra Forest," featuring efficiency-optimized E-Cores with up to 144 cores are available now (288-core models will debut in 2025). The second family, "Granite Rapids," will feature up to 86 P-cores and launch during the third quarter of 2024 (up to 128 P-core SKUs arrive in 2025).

• Intel Launches 144-core' Sierra Forrest' Xeon 6 CPUs, Granite Rapids Follows in Q3

New Power Supplies from Super Flower and Seasonic
In the world of power supplies, Seasonic and Noctua have collaborated to launch the Prime TX-1600 Noctua Edition. This 1,600W power supply has been infused with a 120mm Noctua NF-A12x25 fan that spins at up to 2,000 RPM, an optimized grill fan, and includes 12V-2x6 connectors. It also comes in a brown finish that is indicative of the Noctua influence.

But if you need even more power, look no further than the Super Flower Leadex SF-2800F14HP 3.1. This PSU is rated for a staggering 2800W and supports up to four GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards using 12V-2x6 connectors. Despite the insane power rating, Super Flower says the Leadex SF-2800F14HP 3.1 only supports a single PC.

• Seasonic's latest big and silent 1,600W PSU gets a quieter 120mm Noctua fan upgrade
• 2800W Super Flower PSU boasts four 12V-2x6 power connectors — good for quad GPU setups used for AI training, not gaming

CAMM2 Memory Standard Backed by Kingston and MSI
Both Kingston and MSI are embracing the CAMM2 standard for desktop motherboards. The new space-saving standard is aimed primarily at laptops as a lower-profile alternative to SO-DIMMs (they are 57 percent thinner). However, it will also have a place in the desktop world, as witnessed by Kingston's Kingston Fury Impact DDR5 CAMM2 modules. They first will be available in 32GB and 64GB capacities, with 128GB and 256GB capacities arriving at a later date.

MSI has already announced a desktop motherboard supporting CAMM2 modules, which left many people scratching their heads. Now we see why the company opted for this route: the space-efficient design of CAMM2 allowed it to design a special waterblock to cool the memory directly.

• Kingston unveils new CAMM2 RAM modules at Computex — bold new RAM form factor comes to PC on MSI and Asus boards
• A curious use case for CAMM2 memory modules on desktops: Liquid cooling

Phanteks and InWin Have New PC Cases on Display
If you want to upgrade your gaming rig's enclosure, we have two intriguing options. First is the Phanteks Evolv X2, which has glass panels on three sides, which gives you a nice wraparound look at the hardware lurking inside. Power connectors are hidden, the fans are recessed, and a secret channel hides all those pesky cables. The result is an incredibly clean design that also aids in airflow. Despite the good looks and trick design features, Phanteks says the case will retail for just $150.      

For something a bit more unorthodox, there's the Infinite Signature case from InWin. It features a large 180-degree curved glass panel. The case is also motorized, allowing it to rotate 45 degrees to give you a better look at the internal components.

For something more mainstream, there's the F3 microATX case that can be fitted with plastic, wood, or steel panels to give it your unique and personal touch. Pricing starts at $149 and goes up to $160 if you want wood paneling.

• Phanteks Evolv X2 is the perfect showcase PC chassis — floating motherboard tray and recessed fans a delight
• InWin flexes its glass-bending skills with new Signature case — Infinite and F3 revealed at Computex 2024

ASRock and Cooler Master Showcase Exciting New Gaming Monitors
Computex has always been a big draw for gaming monitors; this year is no exception. ASRock drew in eyeballs with its new Phantom Gaming PG032UFS2B, which features a 32-inch 4K OLED panel with a 240 Hz refresh rate. However, if you dial the resolution back to 1080p, the maximum refresh rate jumps to 480 Hz. 

If 480 Hz isn't fast enough for you, there's the PG27FFX2A, which is claimed to be the world's fastest IPS panel, with a refresh rate of 520 Hz (at 1080p).

For those who want an absolutely massive monitor to dominate your desk and give you an immersive gaming experience, there's the Cooler Master GP57ZS. While it's still a prototype, the GP57ZS is a Dual-4K (7,680 x 2,160) resolution monitor boasting an insane 57-inch diagonal. With a 1000R curve and 2,304 Mini-LED backlit zones, we're eager to get our hands on a future production sample.

• ASRock's 32-inch, 480 Hz OLED monitor is a feast for the eyes and your router
• Cooler Master showcases a massive 57-inch super ultrawide dual-4K Mini LED gaming monitor

The Best of the Rest

• ASRock shows off new AMD Ryzen 9000 motherboards
• Ducky One X keyboard first to use Cherry's innovative induction switches
• MSI launches AI+ laptops for gamers and creators, boasting 100 to 542 TOPS

Kingston's promised CAMM2 modules are here at Computex, bringing the slim and fast RAM standard to desktop computers for the first time. MSI and Asus are also joining the party with their new motherboards being the first to support the new modules. 

The Kingston Fury Impact DDR5 CAMM2 module is a single stick of RAM in the fresh and new CAMM2 standard. The module shown off at Computex runs at a blazing DDR5-5600 and will release in 32GB and 64GB sizes, with 128GB and 256GB sizes suspected to come in the future. Kingston hasn't provided a firm launch date for the modules, but hopes to ship its new tech before the end of 2024. A price tag is also yet unknown, but expect prices above matching specs on SO-DIMM.

The new RAM standard will launch on desktop PCs alongside the motherboards needed to use it. MSI and Asus both had their boards on display at the Kingston booth. MSI, as promised, showed off its new Project Zero motherboard with the new RAM onboard. First teased in a tweet from May. The Z790 Project Zero Plus holds the module tight and provides the novel back-connector motherboard experience. Now PC builders can enjoy the freedom of zero cooling clearance issues ever again with no ATX cable or RAM modules in the way. 

While Asus's new Lengshuikeng motherboard doesn't offer the back-connector cables, it still has a lot going for it. What appears to be a modified Maximus Hero board possesses a healthy helping of yellow stickers around the CAMM2 slot. A to-be-expected explosion of rear IO options festoons the rear of the board.

The CAMM2 standard has a lot of features to be extremely excited about. Besides its obvious space-saving perks, the CAMM2 standard also boasts improved speeds over traditional SO-DIMM modules. CAMM2 modules are 57% thinner than SO-DIMM, making things just a bit closer together on the module. Kingston also advertises a "unique strip" which enhances the connection between module and motherboard, also beating out SO-DIMM. 

CAMM2 can also support multi-channel memory on a single module, meaning only one stick is necessary for dual-channel memory to max out the 128-bit connection to the CPU. Perhaps most excitingly, the standard can also support LPDDR5(X) chips, an even faster DDR5 variant that makes non-soldered LPDDR5(X) memory possible for laptop applications. The new Kingston chips shown off today are only on DDR5 chips, but one day LPDDR5(X) will come to desktop.

Don't worry about having to switch to the new standard just yet, as SO-DIMM is still here to stay for a long while yet. Though its high-end performance will likely give it a small foothold in the highest end of desktop hardware, CAMM2 will be mainly a laptop standard for some years. After all, there's no room on CAMM2 modules for gratuitous RGB!

The Fury Renegade DDR5-6400 C32 has the traits to rival the best RAM. For many of us, it feels like it was just yesterday when it was impossible to have a lot of memory inside our systems if our motherboard didn’t provide tons of memory slots. While many looked forward to DDR5 for its blazing-fast speeds, others eagerly awaited higher-density modules. Luckily, it didn’t take long for memory manufacturers to launch 48GB memory modules, allowing dual and four-DIMM memory kits up to 96GB and 192GB, respectively. The outlook for DDR5 looks bright. Kingston has already demoed 64GB consumer memory modules, pushing the maximum limit to 256GB on a four-slot motherboard, and now, we're taking the brand’s 96GB memory kit from the Fury Renegade lineup for a spin.

Kingston designed a pretty aggressive heat spreader for the Fury Renegade; it sports sharp lines and a dual-toned color combination. The aluminum heat spreader arrives in two blends: black and silver or white and silver. The heat spreader essentially has two layers that overlap each other. The common denominator is the top layer, which will always come in a silver color. The bottom layer, however, can either be black or white, depending on your choosing. Regardless of the variation, though, the PCB sticks to a black color.

The Fury Renegade aims to appease everyone. Those who hate RGB can go with the regular model, which stands 1.54 inches (39.2mm) tall. It's not short, but it likely won't get in the way of your CPU air cooler. Now, if you love RGB, Kingston also offers the RGB model. However, the added RGB light bar on top of the heat spreader pushes the height to 1.73 inches (44mm), which is still pretty acceptable.

Kingston's memory kit has two 48GB DDR5 memory modules. On each side of the black PCB, you'll find eight integrated circuits (ICs), totaling 16. Logically, the memory modules are aligned in a dual-rank design. South Korean chipmaker SK hynix fabricates these H5CGD8MGBDX021 (M-die) ICs, each 3GB in capacity. The memory modules use the 0P=AC XG1 power management IC (PMIC), originating from Richtek's camp.

Upon installation, the Fury Renegade will default to DDR5-4800 with 40-39-39-77 timings. Kingston has provided three XMP 3.0 profiles for the memory modules. The primary profile corresponds to DDR5-6400 at 32-39-39-80 with 1.4V. If your chip can't do DDR5-6400, there are two fallback profiles. One's for DDR5-6000 at 32-38-38-80 with 1.35V, while the other is for DDR5-4800 at 38-38-38-70 at 1.1V. See our PC Memory 101 feature and How to Shop for RAM story for more timings and frequency considerations.

Comparison Hardware

Our Intel test system runs the Core i9-13900K on the MSI MEG Z690 Unify with the 7D28v1G firmware. In contrast, the AMD system pairs the Ryzen 7 7700X with the MSI MPG X670E Carbon WiFi updated to the 7D70v1E5 firmware. The Corsair CUE H100i Elite LCD liquid cooler keeps our Raptor Lake and Zen 4 processor operating temperatures under check.

The MSI GeForce RTX 4080 16GB Gaming X Trio tackles the more graphics-intensive workloads, ensuring that there isn't a graphics bottleneck in our gaming RAM benchmarks. The Windows 11 installation, benchmarking software, and games reside on Crucial's MX500 SSDs. Meanwhile, the Corsair RM1000x Shift ATX 3.0 power supply provides our systems with clean and abundant power, directly feeding the GeForce RTX 4080 with a native 16-pin (12VHPWR) power cable. Lastly, the Streacom BC1 open-air test bench is vital to organizing our hardware.

Intel Performance

The Fury Renegade's balanced mix of speed and capacity enabled the memory kit to deliver strong performance in capacity-intensive workloads involving Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere. The overall application and gaming performance weren't bad, as Kingston's memory kit firmly planted itself in the middle of the pack.

AMD Performance

The memory kit maintained a similar level of performance on the AMD platform. Overall application performance was up one position, while gaming performance dropped slightly. As expected, the Fury Renegade did well in the benchmarks that appreciate density over speed.

Overclocking and Latency Tuning

The focus around the Fury Renegade memory kit isn't overclocking, but employing SK hynix M-die ICs means there should be some overclocking headroom. The best result we achieved was DDR5-6800. We increased the DRAM voltage to 1.45V, so the memory was fine running the exact timings as DDR5-6400.

Lowest Stable Timings

Utilizing 1.45V to optimize the Fury Renegade's memory timings resulted in 30-36-36-80. They were not super tight but still represent a good upgrade compared to the default timings. You could get them down a few more clock cycles if you continue raising the DRAM voltage, but that isn't something we would do.

Bottom Line

Not everyone needs 96GB of memory inside their system. However, if you do, the Fury Renegade DDR5-6400 C32 may be right up your alley. Speeds between DDR5-6000 and DDR5-6400 fit the bill for most consumers and professionals. The memory kit isn't a slouch, delivering respectable performance. Kingston integrated additional XMP 3.0 profiles in the memory modules if your system can't handle DDR5-6400 at this capacity. It's a thoughtful gesture that deserves recognition since many vendors don't offer more than a single XMP 3.0 profile for the advertised speed.

DDR5 isn't cheap, especially if you start looking at the higher-capacity memory kits. Regarding pricing, the Fury Renegade DDR5-6400 C32 retails for $389.99; it's expensive but not a price that will knock you off your chair. Yes, rival brands have cheaper options with similar or almost similar specifications. Nonetheless, the memory kit's pricing is fair for a performance memory kit with a copious capacity backed by a level of quality and support that Kingston is known for.

• MORE: Best RAM
• MORE: DDR DRAM FAQs And Troubleshooting Guide
• MORE: All Memory Content

Kingston, the world's No. 1 supplier of retail memory modules and storage devices, has formed a joint venture with Longsys Electronics to operate in China. The move will combine the strengths of Kingston and Longsys, and lower risks for the former. In addition, the partnership will better address the Chinese retail memory market and avoid any potential problems caused by the U.S.-China tensions. 

Under the terms of the deal, Kingston will hold a 49% stake in the joint venture, whereas Longsys will own the majority with a 51% stake. The joint venture will function as an independent entity with full corporate governance and management capabilities. Its focus will be on offering 'diverse and high-end embedded storage solutions' to customers in mainland China. The joint venture will handle its own product planning, R&D management, supply chain management, and sales. Meanwhile, Longsys will conduct R&D and technical support, whereas Kingston will be responsible for core resource procurement and branding.

By forming a joint venture with a Chinese company, Kingston opens its doors to work with virtually any entity in China that needs embedded storage. Given how keen the U.S. government is to place China-based companies in its Entity List, Kingston saves time and effort by not directly working with certain China-based customers and partnering with a local company to handle these clients. 

Kingston is the world's No. 1 supplier of branded memory modules and solid-state drives. Its lineup also has plenty of embedded storage and memory products, though it is hard to say how successful the company is in this territory.

This joint venture is a response to the ongoing political and business tensions between the U.S. and China. DigiTimes says this represents a bigger trend where American tech companies are teaming up with local firms to stay strong in China. This partnership could also be great news for the supply chain, with companies like Phison Electronic, which works with Longsys, likely to benefit from the deal.

This week, two memory makers — G.Skill and v-color — formally announced their quad-channel memory module kits for AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000-series processors. The new ECC-enabled RDIMM kits with AMD EXPO profiles are factory-overclocked and top at 6400 MT/s and 7200 MT/s speed bins. But apparently, there are more advanced memory modules (up to 7800 MT/s) for Threadrippers coming from more companies, according to a Gigabyte listing. 

In addition to G.Skill and v-color, Kingston is prepping its quad-channel 64GB and 32GB kits rated for DDR5-6000 CL32 at 1.35V and DDR5-6400 CL32 1.4V speed bins for AMD's latest Ryzen Threadripper 7000-series platform that targets both enthusiasts with deep pockets as well as professional-grade workstations. Gigabyte lists these modules alongside its TRX50 platform, so the company primarily positions its kits for the enthusiast-grade quad-channel Ryzen Threadripper 7000 builds. 

Perhaps more interesting is that v-color is prepping a lineup of ultra-fast ECC-enabled quad-channel RDIMMs for AMD's latest Threadrippers with ECC profiles. For those who are fine with moderate performance and stock speeds, v-color will offer DDR5-4800 and DDR5-5200 kits. But for more extreme enthusiasts who want to get every last bit of performance from their TRX50 rigs with Ryzen Threadripper 7000-series CPUs, v-color will offer kits rated for up to DDR5-7800. To provide some context, a quad-channel DDR5-7800 memory subsystem provides a memory bandwidth of 249.6 GB/s. 

Upcoming Memory Modules for AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000-Series CPUs

It is noteworthy that G.Skill, which specializes in high-performance memory modules, tops its overclockable RDIMM offerings with AMD EXPO aimed at Ryzen Threadripper 7000-based systems at 6400 MT/s and equips them with label heat spreaders. 

By contrast, v-color goes above and beyond with 7200 MT/s, 7600 MT/s, and 7800 MT/s. To ensure that its modules do not overheat, it equips them with rather serious heat spreaders akin to those used on some server-grade RDIMMs.

When it comes to pricing, factory-overclocked RDIMMs are certainly considerably more expensive than regular performance-enhanced memory modules. G.Skill's Zeta R5 Neo 64 GB kit costs $530, whereas the 128GB kit is priced at $1,070.

IT industry market research outfit TrendForce has published its latest report on worldwide SSD shipments. The source headlines with the interesting observation that global SSD shipments were down 10.7% YoY in 2022. It also looks at the brands jostling to sell the most units in the global rankings and some of the reasons behind the shipment volume fall.

The report claims that the various supply and demand issues that had plagued the SSD industry were largely resolved in 2022. In particular, TrendForce says that the problem with constrained SSD controller supplies was resolved last year. We must assume that supplies of the other major component, NAND flash, were also flowing without issue.

Despite the seemingly free-flowing supplies of key SSD components, TrednForce is basing this percentage on its figure of 114 million SSDs being shipped during 2022. Of course, we don’t have full-year 2023 figures yet.

So, what happened to cause the significant decline in SSD shipments last year? TrendForce doesn’t address that question directly but does mention that the global economy is still struggling in 2023. Indeed, 2022 saw the pandemic-inspired IT sales bubble burst (with a resulting drop in PC sales), and recessionary forces like inflation and layoffs were frequently in the news. The Russia-Ukraine war has also had impacts far beyond the region.

A larger part of TrendForce’s analysis was of the competition between the top SSD makers, as evidenced by shifting market shares. It was noted that the top five SSD brands increased their combined market share from 53% to 59% from 2021 to 22. Meanwhile, Kingston is clearly dominant, closing on controlling nearly a third of the market on its own. TrendForce says Kingston has been putting roots down in the industrial control and OEM markets to both expand and strengthen its grip.  Another interesting observation is that while worldwide shipments were down, Kingston and Adata managed to consolidate their market dominance.

As for 2023, TrendForce paints a picture of the global economy continuing to struggle and the big players continuing to use their muscle to grow. We have previously reported on the aggressive production cuts by NAND suppliers in search of better prices. However, Chinese NAND and controller suppliers might be keen to address any gaps left by more established brands. Trying to create artificial scarcity to push market prices higher seldom pays off in a truly competitive market. TrendForce notes that there is already evidence of China’s Longsys becoming more international, with acquisitions in Brazil, for example.

It still seems to be a good time for those wanting to add more SSD storage to their systems. However, there are warning signs that consumer SSD prices are leveling out, or even starting to increase.

Not everyone buys the best SSDs or the best HDDs for their systems. EaseUS, a software company specializing in data backup, recovery, and disk management, has shared the results from two storage surveys that reveal the hottest brands and capacities among consumers and how they use their drives.

For the EaseUS Disk Drives Stats 1 report, the company surveyed 207,797 users over the three previous months. The results are based on 754,142 drives consisting of 346,477 SSDs, 200,818 hard drives, and 206,847 USB pen drives.

The first trend that EaseUS noted was that SSDs continued to gain popularity over hard drives. According to the data, SSD owners accounted for 45.94% of drives, almost double that of HDD users with 26.62% participation. Meanwhile, the other 27.43% corresponded to USB pen drives.

SATA and NVMe are the most popular interfaces, which is no surprise. But despite NVMe being faster, SATA remains dominant with a 36.59% usage over NVMe's 17.64%. Curiously, 2.92% of the surveyed users still used the legacy IDE interface. There are also 36.5% lumped together under the nebulous "other" category, however, which likely includes all the USB drives.

The choice of capacity varies significantly between SSD and hard drive users. For SSDs, the 256GB and 512GB capacity range was the preferred choice for 28.96% of the users, with the 128GB to 256GB range came in second at 26.3%. For HDDs, 40.7% of the user base used a 512GB to 1TB hard drive, 20.93% had a hard drive between 256GB and 512GB in size, and only 14.1% chose hard drives between 1TB and 2TB capacity. Again, however, there's a large 10.3% of SSD users in the "other" category — for anything less than 64GB or more than 1TB. Likewise, 24.3% of HDDs were either less than 256GB or more than 2TB

The survey indicated the top three SSD brands were Crucial, Kingston, and Samsung. The most prevalent drives include the Crucial MX500 (500BB), Kingston A400 (240GB and 480GB), Samsung 980 Pro (1TB and 2TB), Samsung 970 Evo Plus (1TB), and Samsung 860 Evo (500GB). HDD owners favored Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital, specifically the Seagate Barracuda, Toshiba DT01ACA100, and WD Blue, all three in their 1TB variants. Kingston and SanDisk led the survey in terms of USB pen drives.

EaseUS presented its findings for the second quarter of 2023 in the EaseUS Disk Drives Stats 2 report. The company examined 336,058 drives (205,889 SSDs and 130,169 hard drives) from 207,797 users. Approximately 36.81% of the user base has two drives in their systems, whereas 28.02% stick to a single drive. Only a small percentage (3.56%) of users have six or more drives.

As expected, most people use and SSD as the primary drive, and a secondary drive for storing data. EaseUS discovered that 74.19% of its users employ an SSD as a primary drive, and only 25.81% still use a platter drive. SSDs deliver significantly higher performance than a hard drive for everyday tasks, including booting the OS and loading other applications.

Space allocation on the primary drive (C drive, as EaseUS calls it) differs a bit between SSD and hard drive owners. 33.17% of SSD owners allocate between 128GB and 256GB for the primary drive, while 31.38% of hard drive owners assign a capacity between 256GB and 512GB. Meanwhile, 57.41% use a GPT (GUID Partition Table) for their drive, while the older MBR (Master Boot Record) disk type makes up the remaining 42.59%.

The last part of the survey clearly shows that users are still reluctant to upgrade to Windows 11. Windows 10, which came out eight years ago, continues to be the fan favorite. The results showed a 51.31% attachment to Windows 10, with another 11.71% using Windows 10 64-bit (we suspect most of the first is still using the 64-bit version, but it just didn't explicitly identify itself as such). By comparison, only 28.26% of users were on Windows 11. Windows 7 and 8.1 mostly fill out the remainder, with a few Windows Server users also present.

A security researcher has found an unexpected dollop of data in a firmware update released for Kingston's KC2000 M.2 NVMe SSD product line. But this isn't a bug or vulnerability — what he found were the lyrics from a Coldplay song. Nicholas Starke was understandably somewhat astonished by his discovery, so reached out to Bleeping Computer to discuss the seemingly random act of stuffing soft-rock lyrics in SSD firmware.

"I have absolutely no clue why it is in the firmware," Starke told Bleeping Computer, adding that, in his years as a researcher and reverse engineer, he has "seen nothing like it." Sadly, the source publication wasn't able to help Starke with his query, but confirmed that the lyrics were indeed squirreled away in the KC2000 firmware. Kingston has yet to comment on the finding, and the only possible reason Bleeping Computer can suggest for lyrics' inclusion is "as sample data for testing."

We also checked out the firmware, which is still available direct from Kingston Support at the time of writing. You can download the firmware and fire up a hex editor (or use an online one) and load up the 'S2681103.bin' file. A quick search for one of the lyric strings such as 'ComeUpToMeet' will bring you to the start of the firmware section where words from Coldplay's The Scientist can be found.

The firmware version under scrutiny was released in early 2020, according to the release notes. It delivers "improved performance in some QD1 workloads," but there's no mention of the musical/lyrical enhancement contained within.

This isn't the first time we've seen strange, seemingly unrelated data hidden away in computer resource files. Last month we noted that Apple had been including a PDF of the Bitcoin whitepaper within every MacOS release since 2018. Apple's Bitcoin PDF has subsequently been removed.

The Addlink S90 Lite is a mid-range PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD that offers nothing new but provides a satisfactory experience at 2TB without breaking the bank. It’s efficient and cool-running enough for laptop and PlayStation 5 use, and also would be a good way to add extra storage to your desktop. It’s very similar to the Corsair MP600 GS but is easier to find at 2TB and its price is competitive with other options. In some cases you could go cheaper with QLC or potentially pay more for the better-performing, TLC-based WD Black SN770. The S90 Lite is somewhere in-between, but nowhere near the performance or value of the best SSDs on the market.

Although unexceptional, the S90 Lite does have some quirks. At 2TB it has an overabundance of NAND flash dies which negatively impacts its performance, giving the Black SN770 an edge. It also has a different pSLC cache response than the MP600 GS which makes it a lot less useful for sustained workloads, although on the bright side that prevents the drive from overheating. Some drives in this class, like the Silicon Power UD90 and Team Group MP44L, have swapped to QLC at high capacity, and that’s also possible for the S90 Lite. Such a configuration would be more comparable to the Solidigm P41 Plus or Crucial P3 Plus, so beware.

Specifications

The Addlink S90 Lite comes in the 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, although the 4TB model seems difficult to find. At the time of review these are on sale for $38.88, $59.88, and $109.99, respectively. This is competitive with similar drives like the Silicon Power UD90, the Team Group MP44L, and the WD Black SN770, to name a few. Some drives in this class have moved to QLC at 2TB while our S90 Lite sample has TLC, which makes this drive most attractive at that capacity.

The S90 Lite is capable of up to 5,000/4,200 MBps for sequential reads and writes, and 780K/800K IOPS for random reads and writes. There is no official TBW but Addlink indicates the warranty is based on “percentage used” by SMART. The warranty is good for five years.

Software and Accessories

Addlink provides an SSD toolbox which displays various information including drive specifications, SMART status, and firmware revision. The toolbox is capable of performing a secure erase.

A Closer Look

The 2TB Addlink S90 Lite uses a simple, single-sided design. Under the basic label there is a controller flanked on each side by two NAND packages. Placing the controller in the middle can provide advantages with heat spreading.

The Phison E21T controller has shown up on a lot of great budget drives. It’s proven to be a winner in that regard, offering excellent performance for a DRAM-less design. Its primary competition is WD’s proprietary controller in the Black SN770 and, as an alternative with QLC, the Solidigm P41 Plus's SM2269XT. It’s fine with either TLC or QLC and many models come with both depending on capacity.

The IA8HG94AYA NAND packages are Micron’s 176-Layer TLC, or B47R. The use of four packages for 2TB of flash implies each package is 512GB. As this flash uses 64GB dies, each package has eight dies in an 8DP configuration. Single-sided drives are ideal as they can fit in a wide range of devices and may be easier to rig for cooling.

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Comparison Products

The 2TB Addlink S90 Lite is facing the WD Black SN770, the Solidigm P41 Plus, the SK hynix Gold P31, the Crucial P3 Plus, the Kingston NV2, the Inland Performance, and the Samsung 990 Pro. The 990 Pro is one of the fastest drives we’ve tested even though it has had its issues. The S90 Lite is more likely to compete with the SN770 and NV2, but the P41 Plus and P3 Plus are popular budget QLC drives within its price range. The Gold P31 remains a popular PCIe 3.0 option. The Performance, for its part, represents older PCIe 4.0 SSD technology with DRAM.

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.

The S90 Lite is average to below average in 3DMark. This result is lower than expected, but it’s still better than the NV2.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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 S90 Lite is again middling and barely edges the NV2 in PCMark 10. Even the P3 Plus, which has QLC with the same controller, does better. Performance on the whole is still satisfactory, however.

The initial reflex is to suspect poor or restrained flash, similar to the situation with the Team Group A440 Pro and Corsair MP600 Pro LPX. However, analysis of other results, particularly random latency as explored below, suggests instead that it’s simply a matter of overhead from an excessive amount of dies to meet 2TB. We saw similar results with the 2TB Corsair MP600 GS. This is one limitation of 4-channel controllers when paired with 512Gb dies, but competing flash has the option of 1Tb dies, which makes the Black SN770 a better option for 2TB right now.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The S90 Lite does better in DiskBench, which fits our expectations for this benchmark. It can’t match the Black SN770 which has been an amazing value SSD in recent months.

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.

For sequential performance we first look at ATTO where the S90 Lite performs as expected. Phison controllers excel at sequential reads especially. The drive disappoints with writes but performance is acceptable. The sequential results from CDM show the S90 Lite hanging in there. The Black SN770 and P3 Plus, two prominent rivals in this price range, are within the same performance ballpark. The P3 Plus is the undisputed choice for 4TB. For 2TB, the S90 Lite is positioned right between these two drives, which feels appropriate. Random 4KB performance is, thankfully, good to great; this is a surprisingly responsive SSD.

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 (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 

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.

The 2TB S90 Lite writes at almost 4.65 GBps in pSLC mode. It does this for approximately 31 seconds within its 145GB cache. It then hits a slow folding mode at just 200 MBps. This is a poor result and much slower than what we saw with the 2TB Corsair MP600 GS, but the 2TB S90 Lite also has a significantly larger cache. This is a trade-off that makes the drive far less useful for heavier or sustained workloads and it may suffer more when fuller. It compensates for this with rapid recovery of its cache.

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 storage.

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 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.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

The 2TB S90 Lite is fairly efficient although it does not match the prowess of the Gold P31. This drive would be more efficient at 1TB for reasons suggested above. This would be a good choice for a laptop if you need this much space.

This recommendation is also valid with regard to thermals. Our S90 Lite idled at 41C and reached a maximum of 64C after massive sustained writes. The drive did not throttle, although this is a consequence of the drive being very slow once its cache is exhausted.

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.

Conclusion

The Addlink S90 Lite is nothing special, but it’s always nice to have another cheap option to add more fast storage. We tested it at 2TB and that is where it’s priced best. There are potentially some cheaper options at this capacity that utilize QLC, and the Black SN770 is a perennial favorite in recent sales for a TLC option. The S90 Lite has to thread that needle. It’s very similar to the MP600 GS but at this late stage the S90 Lite has to be scored a bit lower, particularly as it has a glaring issue with sustained performance. On the whole, the drive provides a “good enough” experience regardless of where it’s used and it has good availability.

Current DRAM-less, PCIe 4.0 SSDs are an excellent bargain and have been for some time. You get very good performance with an experience that subjectively matches much more expensive, high-end options. These drives are also usually efficient and cool-running. One weakness is capacity as there are fewer controller channels, which can also impact maximum sustained performance. Still, this is the space to watch for value, and controllers with faster bus speeds will max out the interface. Faster, denser TLC will also mean better all-around performance and higher capacities. The S90 Lite is living on borrowed time.

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Average selling prices of NAND memory and solid-state drives have been dropping in the recent quarters due to slow demand and oversupply. But as more applications adopt SSDs, their unit and dollar sales are poised to grow. Five years from now, in 2028, SSD revenues will increase to $67 billion, according to estimates from Yole Group (via StorageNewsletter).

In the long run, the overall market size for SSDs is expected to grow from $29 billion and 352 million units in 2022 to $67 billion and 472 million units in 2028, with a compounded annual growth rate of about 15% between 2022 and 2028, Yole claims.  

Out of 352 million SSDs sold in 2022 (including those that belong to our best SSDs list), about 55 million units were enterprise drives and the rest were client SSDs. The enterprise SSD shipments in 2022 were dominated by PCIe SSDs, which accounted for approximately 55% or 30 million units. It is anticipated that this figure will increase to approximately 71% or 79 million units by 2028. The share of PCIe client SSDs is expected to rise from around 85% in 2021 to around 96% in 2028, representing 252 million units and 347 million units, respectively. 

Enterprise drives will also adopt new PCIe interfaces faster than their client brethren. Yole believes that while 69% of enterprise-grade SSDs will use a PCIe 5.0 bus in 2028, only 12% of client drives will use this interface that year. As for PCIe 6.0 SSDs, they are expected to command 16% of the datacenter drives market in 2028, but their share on the client SSD market will be negligible 3%.

SSD sales dropped by 14% year-over-year to $29 billion in 2022 from $34 billion in 2021; in terms of units, this equaled to around 352 million units, down from over 400 million units in 2021. But this sharp decline was a one-time event, Yole Group believes. Meanwhile, the company does not exactly strive to provide a more or less precise dollar or unit sales outlook for 2023 due to the continued slow depletion of inventory and a weak economy, resulting in substantial oversupply.

Not all SSD suppliers are set to monetize on the market growth equally. Client SSD products will experience weak demand in the coming years (according to Yole), while enterprise SSD growth will be driven by 'low-latency storage needs of advanced workloads' in the datacenter space, according to Yole. The market research firm does not disclose which workloads it means though low-latency solid-state storage applications are crucially needed for trendy applications like generative AI. 

Yole Group notes that there are two types of SSD suppliers: NAND integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) that produce their own memory, develop their own NAND controllers, and produce their own drives as well as third-party SSD manufacturers who buy flash memory (in the form of NAND wafers or chips) from IDMs and controllers from third party to build their drives. Meanwhile, both types of SSD producers tend to buy controllers from companies like Silicon Motion, Phison, and Marvell. Large operators of cloud datacenters often develop their own storage devices, yet they still buy memory and/or controllers from third parties. 

Large IDMs like Samsung, Kioxia, Western Digital, Micron, SK Hynix, and Solidigm controlled an 82% share of the total SSD market in 2022. By contrast, third-party SSD makers like Kingston, Seagate, and Adata only controlled 18%.

The Adata Legend 960 is a high-end PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD that has arrived late to the market. Performance is merely average aside from sustained writes, which means it doesn’t excel at anything except for very specific workloads. The drive runs cool enough but is not particularly efficient so is not eligible for our list of best SSDs, but would work well in a PlayStation 5. Warranty and software support are good but not exceptional. This leaves the Legend 960 as something worthwhile to pick up on sale but it does not stand out from other high-end PCIe 4.0 drives in any meaningful way. Meanwhile, faster, PCIe 5.0 SSDs are due out soon.

Specifications

The Adata Legend 960 is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, at $109.99 and $167.11 for the first two capacities. The 1TB price is high given recent sales and general SSD market pricing trends. The 2TB is currently on sale but faces a lot of competition within the same price range, such as the Corsair MP600 Pro XT, the Corsair MP600 Pro NH, and Corsair MP600 Pro LPX.

The 4TB model was not available at the time of review. It has sometimes been challenging to find drives of that size, with the WD Black SN850X and the Inland Gaming Performance Plus being two popular and available options. The Inland Performance Plus that we previously reviewed is also popular and now has updated hardware that matches the Gaming Performance Plus, sans the heatsink.

The Legend 960 is rated for up to 7,400/6,800 MBps for sequential read and write and 750K/630K IOPS for random read and write. The former is essentially the maximum for PCIe 4.0 while the latter falls behind a bit compared to other products, although this is more than enough performance for most. The hardware is certainly capable of more. Adata backs the drive with 780TB of warrantied writes per TB capacity, slightly higher than typical, with all options having a 5-year warranty.

Software and Accessories

Adata provides a download for its SSD Toolbox software package. This application has drive information, diagnostics, cloning, TRIM optimization, a firmware updater, and the ability to perform a secure erase.

A Closer Look

The Adata Legend 960 comes with an installable heatsink/heatspreader that is easy to apply. This is a nice option for a high-end drive like this, especially as it lets you use your own solution that may dissipate heat more effectively if you so choose. The SSD has one DRAM and two NAND packages per side for a total of two and four, respectively. There’s also the prerequisite SSD controller located in the center, a layout that should improve heat dissipation with the spreader.

The controller is an SMI SM2264, a newer design, and this is the first drive we’ve tested that utilizes it. The SM2264 is an eight-channel, 12nm, quad-core ARM Cortex-R8 SSD controller with 1600 MT/s channels. It has 4KB codeword LDPC error correction, double that of the previous generation SM2262EN’s 2K, and can also handle double the dies with ideal support up to 64.

The R8 is a distinct processor revision from the R5, the latter commonly used for SSD controllers, including most or all of the Legend 960’s competitors, and having it manufactured may be why SMI is late to the market. The R8 is also used for the SM2269XT, found on the Solidigm P41 Plus, and it should also form the basis of the upcoming SM2268XT, a controller we will hear more about soon. An R8-based design is potentially very powerful and will be used in SMI’s PCIe 5.0 solutions as well.

The DRAM package is labeled K4A8G165WC-BCTD, which is Samsung DDR4 in a 512Mx16b configuration for 1GB of DRAM. The two modules together are 2GB in total which is the ideal amount for 2TB of flash.

The Legend 960 is using Micron’s 176-Layer TLC (B47R) with thirty-two 64Gb dies in four packages. Each package contains eight dies for 512GiB of flash. This is an ideal amount of dies for interleaving and this particular flash has proven to provide good to excellent performance in our testing.

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Comparison Products

The 2TB Adata Legend 960 is up against some of the best drives we’ve tested. Our comparison list includes the Samsung 990 Pro, the WD Black SN850X, the Kingston Fury Renegade, the Crucial P5 Plus, the Solidigm P44 Pro, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, and the HP FX900 Pro.

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.

The Legend 960 is mediocre to below average in 3DMark. This is a bit disappointing, given that it took SMI a long time to get this controller to market in comparison to Phison’s E18 and InnoGrit’s IG5236.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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 Legend 960 does somewhat better in PCMark 10, but still lags the best SSDs, namely the 990 Pro, the P44 Pro, and the Black SN850X. The P44 Pro is also sold as the Platinum P41.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

When it comes to file copying, the Legend 960 performs adequately. There’s not a huge amount of improvement possible given the limitations of the PCIe 4.0 interface and the flash. Controllers with faster channels are on the way, such as the previously mentioned SM2268XT at 3200 MT/s, but improvements here will largely come with PCIe 5.0 drives and 232-Layer TLC.

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.

No surprises in ATTO. The sequential performance results are satisfactory, minus a dip with smaller reads at QD1. This may be peculiar to SMI’s current R8-based SSD controller architecture as we saw a similar pattern with the SM2269XT on the Solidigm P41 Plus.

Sequential performance in CrystalDiskMark is also average. This is not the end of the world as the numbers are still pretty good. Random performance is often more important and here the Legend 960 unfortunately trails the competition. Good things are possible with the flash being used, so perhaps this is just conservative controller optimization or design to offer third parties more options for their controllers. Such a trade-off is visible with sustained write performance. We are, in any case, more excited for the SM2268XT in the PCIe 4.0 space.

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 (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 

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.

The 2TB Legend 960 writes in pSLC mode for just over 30 seconds at just under 6.5 GBps, demonstrating a cache of almost 200GB. The TLC mode is an impressive 3.59 GBps with a not-too-slow 1.28 GBps folding mode following it. The drive is able to recover after some time back to TLC, allowing it to write an incredible amount in total, second highest of all time for 2TB aside from the Rocket 4 Plus-G.

This is a very good result and the drive is mostly consistent which helps make up for its otherwise lackluster performance results. pSLC recovery is also present and not overly slow. The cache’s size is adequately sized, making this an effective design for any type of use.

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 storage.

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 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.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

The Adata Legend 960 exhibits mediocre power efficiency under load, but its idle power result is excellent. Our idle power testing currently measures what many users would be running on a desktop for maximum performance, which means that the difference is probably not huge relative to the entire system power draw. Additional power-saving features will further reduce power draw, particularly on laptops. The efficiency results paint a better picture of power consumption under load and the Legend 960 is nothing special there.

The 2TB Legend 960 idled at 34C. After 1TB of consistent writes, the drive hit up to 80C but did not quite throttle. This is likely a borderline case given the performance with pSLC as the drive is rated to increasingly throttle at 78C and 81C. This drive could benefit from a heatsink in some systems and for some usage scenarios, such as sustained writes. It seems that Adata has anticipated this as the Legend 960 Max comes with an ample heatsink. The heat spreader is otherwise sufficient.

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.

Bottom Line

The Adata Legend 960 is a mediocre PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD with average performance and below average power efficiency. The included heatspreader is sufficient to keep the drive from throttling which matches well with its excellent sustained performance, although a full heatsink would be better. Adata’s reputation has taken some hits in recent years, but the drive is backed by a decent warranty with sufficient software support. This makes it a capable product, particularly for desktop and PS5 use, but it is not one that particularly stands out.

One reason it doesn’t stand out is that it’s late to the market, which makes sense since it’s using SMI’s delayed SM2264. It is cool to see this technology and competition in the marketplace, but the Legend 960 faces two important hurdles: drastic NAND price drops and the looming take over of PCIe 5.0 SSDs. It’s a perfectly fine drive but it’s put in a tough spot; it has to be priced right to be worthwhile.

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The Acer Predator GM7 is a fast and very efficient PCIe 4.0 SSD. In fact, it’s the most efficient SSD we have tested to date by a significant amount. The GM7's all-around performance is good to great, and its performance in sustained workloads is also quite good. The drive is also single-sided and runs cool, making it one of the best SSDs for laptops and one of the best SSDs for the PS5. The GM7 is also noteworthy for using NAND flash from the China-based YMTC fab, but it doesn't use the company's newest 232-Layer TLC flash, meaning the best might be yet to come. 

Acer’s drives are built by Biwin, a company that also supplies HP. The Predator GM7 uses a new Maxiotek controller that can push the limits of the PCIe 4.0 interface with just four channels. More interestingly, this drive also uses 3D TLC flash from YMTC, a China-based foundry. Recent political events have taken YMTC from being disruptive, with the first 232-Layer flash on the market, to a pariah, as it lost a contract with Apple and may be unable to import its flash to the U.S. This has been quite challenging for the NAND manufacturer. Our current Predator GM7 sample uses a revised version of YMTC’s 128-Layer flash, but the more performant 232-Layer variant is promised and would make for an even better drive. Competing drives will likely arrive with Micron’s 232-Layer TLC and the TenaFe TC2201 controller, but the GM7 is the efficiency king for now.

Specifications

According to the datasheet we received, the Acer Predator GM7 will be available in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB flavors. The product’s box also lists a 4TB SKU, which would be a tall order for this drive’s budget controller. It’s technically capable of 4TB but would need 1Tb dies. Performance peaks at the 2TB model.

The 1TB Predator GM7 is rated for up to 7,400/6,300 MBps of sequential read/write performance, but the datasheet implies a future 2TB model could hit 7,400/6,700 MBps. The performance in random workloads is currently not defined, but the similar Zhitai TiPlus7100 SSD can reach up to 900K/700K in random read/write workloads, and the controller is capable of up to 1M/1M.

The Predator GM7 has a five-year warranty, and the 2TB model has a 1,300 TBW (total bytes written) endurance rating. Thus, the drives would likely have a 650TB-per-TB-of-capacity rating, but be sure to look for an official spec for the other capacity points.

The datasheet lists NVMe 2.0 support, and the controller also supports this spec revision, but the box and CrystalDiskInfo indicate NVMe 1.4 for this drive. Our model is listed as BL.9BWWR.118 on the box, and given the product naming conventions of the Acer Predator GM7000, we made some guesses for 512GB and 2TB models. 

At the time of review, the Predator GM7 was not widely available, but pricing is expected to be $49.99, $89.99, and $159.99 for the three launch capacities. This is not competitive with mid-range PCIe 4.0 SSDs like the Silicon Power UD90, which have been $74.99 or less for 1TB, but the pricing gives it a good starting point for sales against high-end PCIe 4.0 drives like the WD Black SN850X. 

Software and Accessories 

The Acer Predator GM7 does not list free Acronis cloning software on its datasheet as the Predator GM7000 does. We recommend Macrium Reflect Free for your imaging and cloning needs. For information about the drive, use CrystalDiskMark or similar software to check drive health and other data.

A Closer Look

The 1TB Acer Predator GM7 is a plain, single-sided SSD. There is a small controller with no DRAM package and two NAND packages. It is possible to populate this PCB with up to four NAND packages. It would be possible to get up to 4TB with 1Tb dies, but this drive would be best at 2TB with that flash, and possibly best at 1TB with the 512Gb dies our sample uses. The single-sided design makes it a good fit for some slim devices, like laptops.

The controller is the Maxio MAP1602A, also known as the MAP1602 or MAP1602-I. Maxio, or Maxiotek, is a spin-off from JMicron, which once made SSD controllers. This particular controller is made in the 12nm TSMC process node with an ARM Cortex-R5 architecture, distinct from the 22nm TSMC node used on the MAP1202. It is four-channel and DRAM-less, suggesting it should be very efficient. Unlike other DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 controllers we’ve tested, this one has a 2400 MT/s bus that allows it to saturate the interface. This will also make it more power efficient.

The flash is Biwin-binned and packaged YMTC TLC. Like the TiPlus7100, this drive was expected to have YMTC’s newest 232-Layer TLC but actually arrived with a stopgap variation of its 128-Layer design. The 232-Layer TLC will have six planes like Micron’s 232-Layer TLC, as seen in our Phison E26 Preview, along with independent plane operation similar to Micron’s. This flash also has a center X-decoder, like SK hynix’s 176-Layer TLC in the Platinum P41, improving sub-page I/O performance. Other changes will help bring the complexity and cost of the flash down — an area that has been an issue — and allow high die density.

The four-plane 128-Layer variation found on our review sample does not have the new Xtacking 3.0 technology and has a different 2x2 plane layout than the original 128-Layer design. YMTC’s Xtacking uses wafer-on-wafer technology to bond separate CMOS circuitry — page buffers, charge pumps, etc. — on a flipped flash array. Architectures from other flash manufacturers instead have the CMOS under the memory array. YMTC’s design reduces development time and the time to market, plus it has benefits for die density and efficiency, but it is more costly. Challenges include bonding wafers with distinct characteristics, such as different coefficients of thermal expansion (CTE), which require novel vias/plugs to handle the stress.

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Comparison Products

The Acer Predator GM7 is up against the WD Black SN850X, the Crucial P5 Plus, the SK hynix Gold P31, the Acer Predator GM3500, the Samsung 980 Pro, the Solidigm P44 Pro, and the Kingston Fury Renegade.

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.

The Predator GM7 scores average to above-average scores in 3DMark. This is about where we would expect it to fall given its hardware — above PCIe 3.0 and older PCIe 4.0 drives, but below newer PCIe 4.0 options.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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 Predator GM7 does a bit better in PCMark 10, managing to beat the Fury Renegade. The GM7’s fast bus helps it keep up and deliver a solid user experience.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The fast bus also helps here, with file transfers, but the Predator GM7 can’t quite keep up with newer drives like the SN850X or P44 Pro or with the Fury Renegade’s newer flash. It’s possible that with 232-Layer TLC the Predator GM7 would perform a bit better.

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.

The sequential test results for the Predator GM7 are quite good, but not record-breaking. The drive’s bus and interface speeds continue to help. This is reflected in the sequential CrystalDiskMark results, where the drive does quite well. This isn’t quite bleeding-edge performance, but you can get close to that with some cost and power savings. Performance in random workloads isn’t quite as good, although the flash may be a factor here. An upgrade to YMTC’s 232-Layer TLC would likely help a significant amount.

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 (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 

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.

The 1TB Predator GM7 exhibits three primary performance states during sustained write workloads: pSLC, TLC, and folding. It writes at about 6GBps for 28 seconds in pSLC for a cache of almost 170GB. This is not as fast as other drives, and the cache is on the small side, but it does well enough. TLC mode writes at nearly 2.07GBps, which is quite fast and in the vicinity of flash on other four-channel PCIe 4.0 drives like the Team Group MP44L. Folding writes at 770MBps, which, while not amazing, is also not terrible. Cache recovery appears rapid but falls back to TLC speeds in short order.

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 storage.

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 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.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

Power efficiency is where the Predator GM7 shines: It is by far the most efficient SSD we have tested. This is expected as the controller is four-channel and DRAM-less and is paired with YMTC’s Xtacking flash technology. It’s more efficient than other four-channel, DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 drives we’ve tested because the faster bus allows full use of the interface to transfer files quickly. We anticipated this in previous reviews and pointed out that the TenaFe TC2201 may have similar results. However, better things are to come from newer flash and, eventually, “low-end” PCIe 5.0 controllers.

Acer markets this drive as having thermal throttling and power management for efficient heat dissipation and better laptop battery life. It’s also great for the PlayStation 5. The drive is set to throttle at a relatively high 90C initially, and with its small cache, it won’t get there with a normal ambient temperature. Our GM7 idled at 43C for the controller via infrared but never throttled even with a full drive’s worth of writes, reaching only 73C. It may benefit from a heatsink in certain environments for very specific applications.

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.

Conclusion

The Acer Predator GM7 is the most efficient SSD we have ever tested, and it's no slouch with regard to performance. It's good to great in most benchmarks, and performance in sustained workloads is also reasonably good. The great power efficiency helps keep the drive cool, and the single-sided design makes this a great choice for laptops and the PS5. We already liked mid-range PCIe 4.0 drives with four-channel, DRAM-less, 12nm controllers as some of the best values on the market, but pushing the bus further makes the GM7 an even more impressive specimen.

Not everything is perfect, however, as pricing will require threading a needle. The GM7 and similar drives have to cost less than the highest-end drives and cannot cost much more than mid-range PCIe 4.0 alternatives. Sequential performance is not everything, so the choice of flash is also a consideration. The revised 128-Layer YMTC TLC on this drive performed well, but it could be better in some areas — such as random workloads — if Biwin upgrades the drive to 232-Layer flash. Competition is also coming in the form of SSDs outfitted with the TenaFe TC2201 controller and Micron's 232-Layer flash.

This drive is otherwise fairly easy to recommend, if you can find it. Availability is always a concern, which is complicated by the fact that the flashmaker has come under restrictions from the US government. However, we're told those restrictions won't impact this 128-Layer version of the drive, and the impact on possible future 232-Layer variants isn't quite clear yet.

Acer's warranty is solid, but you may want more substantial software support as you would have with, for example, WD's drives. However, if you're looking for a budget-leaning drive that gets you high-end-like performance with great efficiency, it's hard not to suggest the Predator GM7. It demonstrates good things to come for the SSD market and may also be a YMTC harbinger.

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The Sabrent Rocket nano V2 portable SSD is a tiny, lightweight drive up to 4TB that you can easily carry around. It’s very similar to the Corsair EX100U in performance and pricing, with some minor differences. Designed to compete with the best external SSDs, It has TLC flash memory, which is nice, and the embedded design means that it is small and efficient. This flash produces solid sustained write performance, a place where the EX100U eventually falls flat, but the weak UFD controller otherwise holds the nano V2’s performance potential back. This is not significant for many use cases because the USB interface is already restrictive in random performance for heavier workloads.

The 20 Gbps interface is, however, a bonus for traditional sequential workloads such as media file transfers and backups. The tighter and more rugged design of the Rocket nano V2, in contrast to the EX100U, translates to a more reliable experience on the whole, particularly with sustained writes. Direct competitors such as the updated Corsair X6 are stuck with QLC and usually a 10 Gbps interface. The Samsung T7 Shield is also limited to 10 Gbps but is otherwise an excellent portable drive, but it’s also bulkier. The nano V2 is appealing if you need 20 Gbps for burst transfers, high portability with some ruggedness, and a minimum level of sustained write performance.

Specifications of Sabrent Rocket nano V2 

The Sabrent Rocket nano V2 is available at 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. Launch pricing for these capacities is $119.99, $199.99, and $499.99, respectively. This makes the 2TB model the best value, although pricing may change. It is, of course, still far cheaper than the recently-reviewed SanDisk Pro-G40, but a bit more expensive than the updated Crucial X6. It’s very similar to the Corsair EX100U in design and pricing.

The Rocket nano V2 has a 20 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface and reaches up to 1600/1500 MBps for sequential read and write. Random performance is seldom stipulated for external drives due to interface limitations.

The drive has a 3-year warranty with registration which is not atypical in the industry, although we prefer 5-year for premium products. The drive is very small and lightweight coming in at 2.85 x 1.28 x 0.57 inches and 1.57 ounces, although without the outer silicone shell it’s a bit smaller and lighter. This outer covering does offer better protection against drops.

Software and Accessories of Sabrent Rocket nano V2

The Rocket nano V2 comes with Type-C to Type-A and Type-C to Type-C USB cables. This means it can work on a wider range of devices without you having to buy a separate cable.

As of the time of review, the drive was not supported in Sabrent’s SSD toolbox application, but it may be added later. Sabrent generally offers an OEM version of Acronis True Image Home for its SSDs but this drive is not supported yet. We recommend Macrium Reflect Free for imaging and cloning needs.

A Closer Look at Sabrent Rocket nano V2

The Sabrent Rocket nano V2 is a simple, small portable SSD. The overall design is muted but pleasant. An optional silicone shroud offers additional protection. It has a single USB-C port that is not waterproof, in a departure from the EX100U’s annoying solution. It should be pointed out that this is a very lightweight drive which makes its high capacity options quite attractive, considering it manages them without using QLC.

This is an embedded, or hybrid, design, which means that there’s no bridge controller. The Phison U18 is a native UFD controller which makes this closer to a USB drive in many respects. This can reduce cost, complexity, and physical size. It also usually means lower power draw with higher efficiency. It also means that the storage portion cannot be shucked. There are four NAND packages to go along with the controller, two per side.

The Phison U18 controller is only 2-channel with up to 8 chip enable for each channel, which to us suggests it’s best with 8 dies but can manage 16 just fine. Given the capacity range of the Rocket nano V2 it’s possible to use both 512Gb and 1Tb dies, the latter to reach 4TB. This somewhat limits what flash can be used as some TLC is only available at 512Gb and most QLC only at 1Tb.

This gives us a hint about what the Corsair EX100U is using - Corsair would only state 3D TLC - but Sabrent is more explicit about it. To be direct, we would be looking at either Kioxia’s 112-layer BiCS5 TLC or SK hynix’s 128-layer V6 TLC.

This looks like SK hynix’s 128-layer V6 TLC. This is very good flash, famously used in the SK hynix Gold P31, an extremely popular drive. That particular SSD stood out for its excellent power efficiency but its performance was also class-leading. As with the EX100U we see TI DDR4000 ICs which we believe help maintain a high bus speed with this much flash on a 2-channel controller. The EX100U we reviewed appears to have had the same flash but Corsair left open the door to changing it if necessary.

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Comparison Products

The 2TB Sabrent Rocket nano V2 is up against the SanDisk Extreme Pro v2, the Corsair EX100U, the Kingston XS2000, the Samsung T7 Shield, the SanDisk Pro-G40, the Lexar SL660 Blaze, and the Adata SE900G. The XS2000 and SL660 Blaze are being tested at 1TB.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

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.

The Rocket nano V2 is near the bottom in 3DMark, although it does edge out the EX100U. Portable storage is not ideal for high-end gaming, although at this time there is very little difference between any two SSDs when it comes to game load times. This drive would be fine if you wanted to run some games off of it.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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.

PCMark 10 performance tends to follow 3DMark, and that is the case here with the nano V2 again falling behind. The UFD controller operates like a flash drive which can have negative consequences for some performance measurements. This drive is not ideal for heavier application workloads.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

Performance is a bit better in DiskBench, but the USB interface in general is restrictive for all the drives tested except for the Thunderbolt-capable Professional Pro-G40.

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.

ATTO write results are good but read results could be better for the Rocket nano V2. There’s a notable dip at 1MB although performance is acceptable on the whole. CDM sequential performance is also merely fair, with most of the 20 Gbps drives falling within a general range. The 10 Gbps T7 Shield notably falls behind while the TB3 Professional Pro-G40 leads the pack.

Where the nano V2 shines is with random performance in CDM, specifically low queue depth 4KB. The omission of a bridge chip may have helped a bit here, although the flash being used is also quite good. That would explain the XS2000’s relatively poor results in comparison. 4KB performance is an important marker for subjective feel.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

The 2TB Rocket nano V2 writes in pSLC mode at almost 1.57GBps for just over 15 seconds with a cache of 24GB. This is a small, dynamic cache, best used to absorb random writes. Recovery in general will be a bit slower. For larger writes, especially sequential ones, sustained performance in TLC mode is at over 800MBps. This is an excellent result for a drive like this and means it can be used for applications where a certain level of consistent performance is desirable, such as with transferring footage.

This is also where the Rocket nano V2 pulls away from the very similar EX100U. Our sustained write test involves the use of active cooling to avoid throttling. The EX100U still throttled while the Rocket nano V2 did not. The Rocket nano V2’s aluminum casing and thermal interface help keep it cool, an important consideration especially in warmer environments. That casing is also more protective in general.

We wanted to get a feel for how this drive handled a sustained load in comparison to the EX100U, a drive that easily throttled, with no active cooling. With sustained writes, the maximum temperature reached by SMART was 75C with the metal part - inside the silicone outer case - reaching 54C. The Rocket nano V2 did not throttle.

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. Portable SSDs are tested with write caching explicitly enabled for the device within Windows.

Conclusion

The Sabrent Rocket nano V2 is a capable but unexciting portable SSD. Performance is generally weak but it does well with 4KB and sustained writes, two crucial areas for storage of this type; portable drives are often used to transfer files, particularly larger files, with occasional reading of backup data. The Rocket nano V2 is also quite small and lightweight which makes it easy to carry around, it comes with both types of USB cables you might need, and the metal exterior adds protection and helps keep the drive cool. It checks all the boxes for effective portable storage.

The Rocket nano V2 additionally has an optional silicone case which can add some drop resistance, but the drive lacks an IP rating and the USB port is not waterproof. Coupled with just a 3-year maximum warranty, this reinforces the drive as being budget-oriented. The good news is that it’s available up to 4TB and comes with excellent TLC, factors that help set it apart from some of the competition. The 20 Gbps interface is also nice but of secondary importance.

We are giving this drive the same score as the EX100U despite the fact that the Rocket nano V2 is the better drive. The nano V2 does not have the same throttling issues of the EX100U and the overall design also feels superior, almost like a premium product. However, we cannot score it higher because the performance just isn’t there. That is the trade-off for getting such a small drive, keeping in mind that this is also a very efficient design that won’t completely drain your laptop battery. It really comes down to picking the drive that suits your needs at the right price point, and the Rocket nano V2 is a fair option to have.

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The Phison PS5026-E26 SSD controller will bring PCIe 5.0 performance to the masses in Q1 of this year. Our reference design sample pairs it with Micron’s new 232-layer TLC, which improves upon the excellent 176-layer NAND flash utilized in a wide range of products. The result is unprecedented sequential speeds and immense potential IOPS, although these do not come without some caveats. High-end PCIe 5.0 drives will require proper cooling and the right platform to reach and maintain the best levels of performance.

Our Phison E18 controller preview from mid-2021 demonstrated that Phison was serious about bringing top-tier performance to consumers earlier than other controller manufacturers. The E26 reflects this mindset and manufacturers will begin to advertise SSDs based on the controller sooner rather than later. PCIe 5.0 drives can offer very high levels of sequential performance, but the newer controllers can also raise the IOPS bar for heavier workloads, blowing away all the PCIe 4.0 contenders on our current list of the best SSDs. This is not too surprising as the E26 is based on an enterprise controller design, and in fact it has optional enterprise features.

These drives will also be among the first with cutting-edge flash which will improve latency and power efficiency. We did not see direct benefits with the E26 in these two areas, but the technology will be optimized and the future DirectStorage API should also benefit from the additional all-around speed improvements. For now it does feel a bit like overkill, but pushing the limits is necessary to make use of increasing PCIe bandwidth. This drive shows that it can leave PCIe 4.0 solutions in its dust.

Specifications

The Phison E26 ES (engineering sample) SSD is rated for up to 14,000/11,800MBps for sequential read and write and 1,500/2,000K IOPs for random read and write, both respectively. This is a PCIe 5.0 SSD and is capable of almost double the sequential read performance of previous-generation, PCIe 4.0 SSDs that use the Phison E18 controller. Maximum IOPS has also increased significantly. Actual performance is dependent on the flash type and amount of flash, as well as the platform. In fact, performance variance may be more significant with PCIe 5.0 SSDs, and even come down to which M.2 or PCIe slot is utilized for the drive.

The Phison E26 controller is based on the enterprise E20 controller used in Phison’s X1 SSD solution and it therefore has optional features not commonly available in client products. This includes encryption but also SR-IOV, ZNS, and up to 64 namespaces support. This is coupled with Phison’s I/O+ Technology which is designed for DirectStorage gaming, first implemented in the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G. Our sample SSD is using Release Candidate 2 (RC2) firmware and is not a retail sample. Performance for this controller may also improve with faster flash.

Software and Accessories

Software support will depend on the individual manufacturers which choose to use the Phison E26 controllers in their SSD products. Free software for benchmarking, health monitoring, and imaging are widely available, but many manufacturers prefer to offer their own SSD toolboxes to provide firmware updates. Heatsinks may be considered accessories if they are self-applicable, but PCIe 5.0 drives are bound to run hot so will typically arrive with a heatsink pre-installed.

A Closer Look

Our E26 SSD sample (ES) arrived with an actively-cooled heatsink. This is a necessity to keep high-performance drives from overheating, although proper passive cooling may be sufficient. Active cooling is not always desirable as small fans can be noisy and present another point of failure to the product.

Underneath the heatsink the Phison E26 controller is paired with a memory module, four NAND packages, and Phison’s power management integrated circuit (PMIC). This is not an unusual layout for high-end Phison drives - the Phison E12 controller also only mounted up to four NAND packages until it was later shrunk with the E12S revision. This could limit capacity to some extent but the controller is designed for 1Tb/128GB dies with 32 of them being optimal, easily manageable with four NAND packages.

The E26’s architecture is similar to Phison’s previous controllers, utilizing a dual ARM Cortex-R5 design with triple-core CoXProcessors. The R5 is a proven basis for the majority of consumer SSD controllers but some based on the Cortex-R8 are showing up on the market. This includes the SM2269/XT in the Solidigm P41 Plus and the SM2264 in the ADATA Legend 960. The R8 is more powerful and has more features than the R5, but Phison believes the R5 makes more sense for scalability. This works particularly well with its co-processor design which offloads common processes.

The memory is SK hynix H9HCNNNCPUMLXR-NEE which is 32Gb/4GB of LPDDR4. This is lower-power memory but is also larger in capacity than what is typical for a 2TB drive. The E26 can easily handle 4TB of flash and there’s also a free spot for a second memory package on the PCB’s rear. Some NVMe 2.0 features could make use of extra memory on the SSD while on the other hand some, like Zoned Namespaces (ZNS), can reduce memory overhead. 4GB makes sense for an ES and the extra amount has no bearing on our testing today.

The flash modules are labeled NV066 which is Micron’s 232-layer TLC (B58R), a generational improvement over the now-ubiquitous 176-layer TLC (B47R). These modules are 4Tb/512GB each for a total of 2TB. Micron’s 232-layer TLC uses 1Tb/128GB dies so each package has four dies (4DP) for a total of sixteen, which provides per-channel interleaving but peak performance would be with thirty-two at 4TB. Inter-die interleaving is improved with this generation of flash as each die has six planes rather than four. All else being equal, this should lead to at least a 50% improvement in maximum performance.

Along with the addition of more planes, it is expected that 4K read and write latency will be improved. Micron implements independent plane reads with this architecture, a technique used in its 176-layer QLC to good effect with the Crucial P3 and Crucial P3 Plus. The independent word-line technology was introduced with its 176-layer TLC, first spotted on the Crucial P5 Plus. This particular 232-layer flash is running at an I/O speed of 1600 MT/s but is capable of 2000 and 2400 MT/s.

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Comparison Products

The Phison E26 sample drive is going up against some of the fastest drives on the market, all PCIe 4.0. This includes the Acer Predator GM7000, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, the Kingston Fury Renegade, the WD Black SN850X, the Solidigm P44 Pro, the Adata Legend 960, and the Samsung 990 Pro. The Rocket 4 Plus-G has custom firmware using Phison’s I/O+ technology which is also present on the E26. The Black SN850X and 990 PRO also have optimizations to smooth out sustained performance.

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.

The Phison E26 sample is clearly the fastest SSD in 3DMark, beating the previous champion - the Samsung 990 Pro. The extra bandwidth that PCIe 5.0 offers plus the lower latency of Micron’s 232-layer NAND allow the E26-based SSD to dominate.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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.

Unsurprisingly, the E26 sample is also the fastest drive in PCMark 10. It would offer an excellent user experience.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The E26 SSD’s PCIe 5.0 bandwidth helps it transfer data faster than any other drive we’ve yet tested. Performance here perhaps looks underwhelming, but that is due to the mixed nature of the dataset being used which includes smaller files. Combined with the default storage API, the drive’s potential is hampered.

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.

The E26 sample dominates in ATTO sequential thanks to its PCIe 5.0 interface. There is a noticeable dip at 2MB for sequential read which may be a result of the flash architecture given the superpage size on this sample. A minor dip at 512KB for sequential write may be an anomaly or a result of firmware immaturity. Sequential performance in CDM puts the E26 sample firmly in first place, regardless of queue depth or read/write.

Random 4KB performance is fairly good but not exceptional. Further optimization is possible here. The low queue depth results are good enough that you won’t notice the difference, plus the firmware optimization for DirectStorage will probably bring more long-term gains with larger random reads. These results may be due to the E26 controller’s origins or may show that Micron’s new flash is merely iterative of its 176-layer TLC, although there are certainly improvements in other areas.

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 (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash.

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.

The E26 sample writes at up to 10.2GBps in pSLC mode for over 21 seconds with a cache around 220GB. This is dynamic and conservative in size. The drive then hits a TLC mode at up to 3.5GBps. This mode can be sustained for some time before the folding state hits, where sustained write performance begins to average about 1.36GBps.

This general pattern matches that of the Rocket 4 Plus-G, which is using the Phison E18 controller with Micron’s 176-layer TLC. The E26 controller lets the ES hit much higher speeds in pSLC but it’s about the same speed otherwise, but since it is using denser dies it does not have the same amount of die interleaving with both drives tested at 2TB. The 1TB Rocket 4 Plus-G is slower. This leaves open the possibility of better TLC performance with a 4TB E26 SSD.

Cache recovery is not rapid, as expected. The smaller cache is still large enough to absorb random writes even when the drive is fuller and TLC performance is quite good. Normal use will allow plenty of idle time for the cache to recover while sustained performance will benefit from the smaller cache design. 

The E26 ES also has I/O+ technology to improve sustained performance, particularly with random reads for DirectStorage. The first DirectStorage-capable game, Forspoken, is due out this month, and Phison tells me that a software demo will be out later this month.

We use Iometer for sustained write testing and Phison informs me that there is still a performance issue with this benchmarking software. However, it does not affect the results for our type of testing.

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 storage.

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 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.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

The E26 sample stumbles when it comes to power efficiency. Idle power consumption in particular is quite poor, but it’s unlikely you will be using a drive with active cooling in a laptop and our idle testing is done on a desktop which tends to engage higher power states. Phison informs me that SSDs based on the E26 controller should be more efficient than current high-end PCIe 4.0 drives since they will finish power tests like ours far more quickly, as long as they fall within the same general power and thermal envelopes. This is likely the case as the M.2 form factor has power delivery limitations and improved cooling can prevent the newer drives from throttling.

We reiterate that there can be significant performance swings on PCIe 5.0 SSDs based on the platform, the M.2 or PCIe slot being used, thermal conditions, and other factors. This can influence perceived power efficiency. Newer PCIe 4.0 DRAM-less drives have proven to be very efficient and are usually single-sided so make better sense for wide support and particularly laptop use. Super high-end drives like the E26 sample may require some further maturation and a proper platform in order to get the most out of the hardware. Idle desktop power consumption aside, drives based on the E26 controller should be workload-efficient.

Temperatures were not an issue with the reference cooling design. Drives with the E26 controller and active cooling have previously been spotted so some of this will come down to manufacturer choice. It’s possible that some motherboards, now or in the future, will come with appropriate M.2 heatsinks - assuming your case has proper airflow. We therefore tested this drive naked to see how it handles itself in comparison to other drives.

Without the heatsink the controller idled at around 75C with a composite sensor reading of 55C. Writing 60-80GB of data causes the controller to hit 90C+, causing the drive to throttle and then eventually go offline. This drive absolutely needs a heatsink to hit and maintain PCIe 5.0 speeds.

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.

Conclusion

PCIe 5.0 SSDs, like those that will use Phison’s E26 controller, are exciting on paper. Up to 14GBps - which is not the ceiling as faster flash is required to get the most out of this controller - sounds like a lot of bandwidth for non-volatile storage. Some would say too much, as there is already difficulty in detecting any improvement with high-end PCIe 4.0 drives over reliable 3.0 options like the SK hynix Gold P31 or Samsung 970 EVO Plus. Still, there are some improvements, as newer controllers have higher power efficiency with better use of features like host memory buffer (HMB). In fact, budget PCIe 4.0 drives like the WD Black SN770 are quite excellent. The E26 sample SSD, on the other hand, demonstrates that high-end drives of the future will require good cooling.

Phison is at the forefront of SSD development with its I/O+ technology but other manufacturers are also designing their drives to perform smoothly with sustained workloads. DirectStorage will push the limits of drives with deeper queue depth workloads and larger random reads than the 4K most are used to tracking. We can already see hints of unprecedented possibilities with this sample.

The E26 sample set several records in our benchmarks, but does that really matter? Realistically, you will wonder if it’s worth the premium to jump up to a PCIe 5.0 drive. It seems, though, that the premium for 5.0 drives will not match the sticker shock that came with the first high-end 4.0 drives. If you have a platform that can wield this type of SSD it won’t cost you an arm and a leg compared to current high-end drives. You may be willing to pay a little bit more to future-proof your system, although we won’t know until later this year - at the earliest - if that’s a sensible approach, but the option is there.

We are impressed by the performance this sample delivered, knowing that better things are yet to come. We also know that real products are right around the corner and that they should be affordable. The E26 is a pioneering piece of hardware and that should tickle enthusiasts, especially as it is showing off novel six-plane flash with this sample. Many may be less excited because sequential performance is often considered unimportant and DirectStorage maturity is still in the future. The idea of powering and cooling one of these beasts can also be daunting.

There are two other good things about this technology, though. The first is that it brings enterprise features into the mainstream, which will please some power users. It suggests that DirectStorage will actually push SSDs in an effective way and that content creation applications will also benefit from the technology. Furthermore, it shows that newer flash with higher controller bus rates will bring efficient four-channel designs which will rival high-end 4.0 drives while being cheaper. If someone really wants to set records, though, they will have plenty to work with very soon.

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January 3, 2023 Update: We've added new testing for the 1TB Solidigm P44 Pro SSD on page 2.

Original Review published December 13, 2022:

The Solidigm P44 Pro is an SK hynix Platinum P41 by another name. That drive was the fastest drive we had ever tested when it launched and is now just slightly surpassed by the much-more-expensive Samsung 990 Pro. By being under the Solidigm umbrella, the P44 Pro has access to a full software suite and also arrives with a significantly lower MSRP than the Platinum P41 at all capacities. 

While there are some minor firmware tweaks, the overall performance remains about the same with the added benefit that this drive should see better global availability. Designed to compete with the best SSDs, the P44 Pro also lacks an option for a heatsink but is otherwise an excellent choice for most applications.

Specifications for Solidigm P44 Pro 

The Solidigm P44 Pro is available at 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB. This is slightly different from the Platinum P41 which had a bit more overprovisioning. In practice, this does not translate to any significant difference in the user experience. It’s the same amount of flash, with just a bit more available to the user with the P44 Pro. Maintaining some free space on any SSD is recommended and, in daily use, there will not be any apparent difference between these two drives. The MSRP is $79.99, $129.99, and $219.99 for the three launch capacities, all significantly lower than the Platinum P41.

Otherwise, the P44 Pro matches the specifications of the Platinum P41, with up to 7,000/6,500 MBps for sequential read and write. IOPS are not officially listed but theoretically it should hit the 1.4 million/1.3 million IOPS for read and write like the Platinum P41. AES-256 encryption is supported as is TCG Pyrite. Solidigm backs this drive with a 5-year warranty and 500TB, 750TB, and 1200TB of writes for each capacity. This is a PCIe 4.0 drive in the M.2 2280 form factor but will still work great in a 3.0 slot.

Software and Accessories for Solidigm P44 Pro 

The P44 Pro has three downloadable pieces of software: the Solidigm Storage Driver, the Solidigm Bootable Firmware Update Tool, and the Solidigm Storage Tool. We covered these in our Solidigm P41 Plus review with particular attention on the driver as it allows host-managed caching (HMC) for the P41 Plus.

The Bootable Firmware Update Tool allows you to update Solidigm SSD firmware via bootable USB or optical media. The Solidigm Storage Tool also allows the updating of firmware, including with a command-line interface (CLI), but offers a GUI that details the health and features of the SSD.

A Closer Look at Solidigm P44 Pro

The Solidigm P44 Pro looks almost identical to the Platinum P41. It’s a single-sided drive with a controller, DRAM, and two NAND packages.

Some minor changes are apparent with the power management circuitry, but such analysis is outside the scope of this review. More generally, it’s possible to have either a discrete solution using multiple components or something tighter with a power management integrated circuit (PMIC). There are differences in terms of cost and board space required, but the current PMIC supply crunch probably makes this drive’s design a bit easier to produce in numbers. Manufacturers like Phison make their own PMICs but generally are licensing out the controller as well.

For the full technical details of SK hynix’s controller and flash, please see our Platinum P41 review. The Aries is a powerful controller that raised IOPS performance to new heights, perhaps only beaten by Samsung’s Pascal on the 990 Pro. This level of performance is extraordinary for a consumer drive, but future developments such as Microsoft’s DirectStorage will be more demanding on SSDs.

Solidigm is using SK hynix’s LPDDR4 for the drive’s DRAM cache with 2GB of memory being plenty for a 2TB drive. We like seeing this amount of DRAM, and anything that can offer a bit of power savings is also welcome.

The flash is identical to that found in the Platinum P41: 176-layer TLC. This is generationally up-to-date and it will be some time before we see more layers in full production due to unfavorable market conditions. 

Solidigm also has its own flash, such as the 144-layer QLC inherited from Intel on the P41 Plus, a situation that may confuse some, especially as SK hynix has demonstrated 176-layer QLC with a different architecture. Further confusion is brought on by the Solidigm P41 Plus having a similar name to the Platinum P41. With the P44 Pro, this finally goes away, but it may be best thought of as a wider-circulated Platinum P41.

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Comparison Products

The 1TB Solidigm P44 Pro is up against some very fast drives, such as the WD Black SN850X, the Kingston Fury Renegade, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, the Samsung 980 Pro, the SK hynix Platinum P41, and the Crucial P5 Plus. Also tested is the Solidigm P41 Plus to give some idea on what you’re getting in a higher-end product.

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. 

The P44 Pro is the fastest drive we’ve ever tested in 3DMark at 1TB, as well.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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 P44 Pro dominates in PCMark 10, too. This speaks well of SK hynix’s excellent new flash and its ability to optimize its controllers.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The P44 Pro is first in DiskBench, too, being the fastest 1TB SSD we’ve tested.

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.

There are no issues with the P44 Pro’s ATTO performance. It’s not the best but the CDM sequential results show the drive can hold its own, with only a dip for QD1 writes. Random 4K QD1 latency is good but not the very best. The P41 Plus sibling struggles a bit more at 1TB with sequential performance due to dense QLC, but this is not an issue with 4KB performance.

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 (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.

The 1TB P44 Pro manages almost 6.5 GBps in pSLC mode before falling to below 1.6 GBps afterwards. Both modes are a bit slower than they are with the 2TB model, but still very fast. The cache is a bit smaller on the 1TB capacity, but larger in relative terms at nearly 215GB. This underlines the fact that this hardware holds up better at 1TB than the competition. We have not yet benchmarked a 1TB 990 Pro, but as of now, the P44 Pro is the best drive on the market at this capacity in terms of overall performance.

Cache recovery is the same as with the 2TB model and the Platinum P41: fast for static, slow for dynamic. This is typical and is a good way to balance endurance and performance.

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 storage.

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 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.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

The 1TB P44 Pro is extremely efficient, matching the class-leading Platinum P41, though it doesn’t quite see the edge that the 2TB model does. SK hynix and Solidigm have done an excellent job in optimizing this drive at all capacities. The P41 Plus, on the other hand, could use some work. However, that drive is using flash that originated with Intel and the controller is not proprietary, so we expect better things in the future for its lower-end options.

The 1TB model closely matched the 2TB in temperature testing. TLC writes are a bit faster at 2TB, 1.65 GBps versus the 1.5 GBps here, but both models throttled down to about 925 MBps after hitting 82C. A heatsink is again recommended.

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 SSD.

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Solidigm P44 Pro SSD (2TB)

RATING: ★★★★ ½ (4 ½ Stars)

PROS

+ Excellent all-around performance
+ Strong sustained performance
+ Power-efficient
+ Good support
+ Better MSRP

CONS

- Could use a heatsink
- No 4TB option

OUR VERDICT
The 2TB Solidigm P44 Pro is a top-tier PCIe 4.0 SSD that matches or exceeds the fastest drives on the market. It also has the advantages of better pricing and availability, along with Solidigm’s software support.

Comparison Products (2TB)

The 2TB Solidigm P44 Pro is up against the best drives we’ve tested, which includes the WD Black SN850X, the Samsung 990 Pro, the SK hynix Platinum P41, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G, and the Kingston KC3000. The Crucial P5 Plus is also here, but it tends to fall behind the other high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Lastly we have the Solidigm P41 Plus, which is more budget-oriented, to show the gap in Solidigm’s product stack.

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.

We see excellent results from the P44 Pro in 3DMark. It edges out the Platinum P41 and Black SN850X, only falling short of the 990 Pro.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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 P44 Pro is again nipping at the heels of the 990 Pro in PCMark 10. A Solidigm representative did suggest that there have been some minor firmware optimizations on this drive, which may have better tuned it for these types of workloads than the Platinum P41 is.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The P44 Pro copies faster than any other drive we’ve tested, although the differences are small between the top drives.

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.

The P44 Pro closely matches the Platinum P41 in ATTO, as expected. There are minor improvements at most block sizes. The P44 Pro doesn’t quite peak as high as some other drives, though. CDM sequential performance looks good, aside from a bit of a gap with the QD1 write. Random 4KB QD1 performance remains strong with only a small edge for the 990 Pro.

The P41 Plus does pretty well with random 4KB QD1 writes, in particular, which may seem surprising for QLC. Random writes should be and usually are buffered with pSLC. Reads may be a different story if they come from the native flash, which is usually the case. This is one reason Solidigm allows for read caching from pSLC on the P41 Plus, but only when the drive is less than half full.

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 (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.

Sustained write performance for the 2TB P44 Pro is incredibly similar to that of the 2TB Platinum P41. The pSLC write speed is a bit above 6.6 GBps with a cache of about 320GB. Native or TLC performance is about 1.75 GBps, although there is some minor folding going on in the background. 

These results are excellent even if the P44 Pro cannot outwrite a drive like the Rocket 4 Plus-G. The hybrid cache recovers fast in the static portion but slow in the dynamic. Solidigm has opted to keep the Platinum P41’s consistent design.

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 storage.

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 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.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

The P44 Pro is incredibly efficient, being the most efficient drive we’ve ever tested by edging out the Platinum P41. It’s possible that the minor firmware changes have allowed it to eke out a bit more performance with the same power draw. The P41 Plus is less efficient on the whole, but it also pulls less absolute power. That may make it a better choice for some laptops due to less thermal overhead.

Our expectations are that the P44 Pro should welcome a heatsink under an extended load, as with the Platinum P41. This proved to be the case. The drive idled at about 41C and hit a throttling temperature of approximately 82C after 450GB of writes, a bit more writing than the Platinum P41 allowed. Performance then dropped to 925 MBps, which is still considerable. We would recommend a heatsink for this drive.

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 SSD.

Conclusion

The Solidigm P44 Pro is not a particularly exciting SSD, but it is an excellent one. It’s built on the winning formula of the SK hynix Platinum P41, one of the best SSDs we’ve ever tested, with only beneficial changes. It has the same specifications but now has Solidigm’s software support. Its price has also been lowered, despite the Platinum P41 already being competitive soon after its launch. Availability also promises to be better which is good news if you’ve been lamenting the difficulty in getting SK hynix drives in your particular area.

Some adjustment is required to get used to seeing Solidigm as a major market force. Drive naming conventions that cross over to SK hynix have also been a little confusing. In time, all of this will no doubt coalesce into some exciting products. We dinged the P41 Plus partly for its high MSRP and Solidigm quickly brought the price down on the coveted 2TB SKU. Now, the Platinum P41 can be had more cheaply and more widely with the P44 Pro. It’s also supported by software and documentation from Solidigm which demonstrates a strong market strategy.

Our complaints about the P44 Pro are, like for the Platinum P41, few in number. Drives of this caliber really should have a heatsink variant, although we can understand the reasons why they would forego it. We would also like to see a 4TB option, as the WD SN850X has and the Samsung 990 Pro is expected to get. Still, the overall package here is exemplary with consistently high performance matched with excellent efficiency. You can’t go wrong with the P44 Pro.

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The Kingston NV2 is one of those SSDs that is just too good to be true. The price is exceptional, especially at 2TB, and it is sold as a PCIe 4.0 drive. Yet it has no definitive hardware inside and its performance for both of our samples is distinctly bottom of the barrel. It also runs a little hot and inefficient in our testing, too. 

Miles behind the best SSDS, the NV2 may still make a good secondary or backup drive if your budget is absolutely strapped but it is not recommended for primary or laptop use. It is on the whole a good example of caveat emptor - buyer beware.

The NV2 follows Kingston’s previous NV1, a drive very much in line with Kingston’s philosophy of providing cheap drives at scale. The SATA-based A400 is the perfect example of this as it was a prevalent drive in cheaper builds. The NV1 followed suit and became more popular than it perhaps deserved. The NV2 is similar in that it uses a hodge-podge of hardware - different controllers and NAND flash from drive to drive - offered at an insanely low price. It should become commonplace especially in regions with limited SSD options. If you actually have solid alternatives, however, please look elsewhere.

Specifications

The Kingston NV2 is available in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. At the time of review, pricing for these capacities was $22.99, $34.99, $54.00, and $124.99, respectively. This drive is often on sale with the 1TB and 2TB SKUs becoming even better values. This drive is the A400 of NVMe drives and a fitting replacement for the NV1, which could be good or bad depending on how you look at it. In essence it is a dirt cheap NVMe SSD that meets the minimum requirements to get the job done.

The drive can manage up to 3,500 / 2,800 MBps for sequential read and write, respectively, but has no random performance specifications. This makes sense because it can come with more than one controller and more than one type of flash. The sequential write specifications are such that it can only have QLC at 1TB and 2TB, however. The sequential values are low for a PCIe 4.0 drive for a good reason: Kingston set them for the weakest possible controller and flash.

The NV2 has a 3-year warranty and can manage 320TB of writes per TB capacity. This is exactly as expected for a budget drive.

Software and Accessories

The Kingston NV2 is a barebones drive but Kingston does offer an SSD Manager on its site. This has typical SSD toolbox functionality and is able to display disk information and health, update drive firmware, and securely erase drives. It only works on Microsoft Windows.

A Closer Look

Although we are looking at the 2TB in the photos here, mention will also be made of the 1TB because the flash and controller on the Kingston NV2 will vary from drive to drive. The 2TB drive is single-sided with a DRAM-less controller and four NAND packages. There’s not much to this drive but it should always be single-sided for where that matters.

The 2TB model we sampled is using the SMI SM2267XT controller. This is one of those entry-level PCIe 4.0 SSD controllers that barely qualifies for the 4.0 moniker. It’s similar to the Phison E19T controller used on drives like the WD Black SN750 SE or the Inland TN436. This technology has a 1200 MT/s bus which, with four channels, means it can saturate a x4 PCIe 3.0 link, much like the controllers on the SK hynix Gold P31 and WD Blue SN570.

For all purposes this makes the controller a jacked-up SM2263XT with higher bandwidth and IOPS but not really new technology like the SM2269XT. This performance requires a much higher core clock rate. This means the power efficiency should be fairly terrible for a budget drive when compared to other, newer PCIe 4.0 DRAM-less options like the HP FX900 and Silicon Power UD90.

Our 1TB sample also uses the SM2267XT, but this drive has been spotted with the newer SM2269XT as well. Given the limited performance specifications, it’s possible this drive could also come with the comparable E19T as well. Other, faster controllers closer to the SM2267XT, such as the InnoGrit IG5220 and Phison E21T, are also technically possible.

Four 512GB NAND modules with four 128GB dies deliver a total of 2TB. This is Intel’s 144-layer QLC. This flash is used on the Intel 670p and Solidigm P41 Plus. It remains arguably the best QLC on the market but is still QLC.

Our 1TB sample arrived with Kioxia 112-layer BiCS5 TLC, instead, but QLC is a possibility at that capacity.

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Comparison Products

The 2TB Kingston is up against other 2TB drives including the Crucial P3 Plus, the Adata XPG Gammix S50 Lite, the Corsair MP600 GS, the SK hynix Gold P31, the Solidigm P41 Plus, the WD Black SN770, and the Samsung 990 Pro.

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.

The NV2 comes in dead last and by a significant margin. It’s the worst for score, bandwidth, and latency. There’s really no excuse here as the P41 Plus, which has the same flash, is far superior and the S50 Lite, with the same class of controller but with DRAM, is also faster. The NV2’s older, DRAM-less controller just can’t hang. It should still be close enough with load times so is fine for a dedicated games drive.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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 NV2 is below average in PCMark, although it manages to still beat the popular Gold P31. The S50 Lite is using the DRAM-equipped version of the NV2’s controller, the SMI SM2267, but with older flash.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The NV2 copies at a slow speed, no better than the PCIe 3.0 Gold P31 or the entry-level PCIe 4.0 drives, entry-level meaning glorified PCIe 3.0 drives like the S50 Lite and NV2. There’s little reason to waste a 4.0 slot on these drives.

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.

The NV2 is essentially dead last in ATTO. CDM sequential performance is below average to poor. 4KB performance is also relatively poor, although it beats out the P3 Plus for reads at a queue depth of 1. This is adequate for a gaming drive but basically only provides a budget experience.

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 (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.

The 2TB NV2 maintains 2.95GBps in pSLC mode for over 190 seconds for a cache of 561GB. This implies that the entire drive is capable of pSLC mode so the dynamic cache should usually be about one-fourth the size of the free space. The cache is relatively quick to recover, as expected.

QLC mode flatlines around 240MBps which is not terrible for QLC but still pretty poor on the whole. This is about what we would expect from this flash when using such a wide cache. Comparisons to the P3 Plus and P41 Plus are enlightening to see how cache size and pSLC speed impact QLC performance. This is a drive that will suffer when fuller, particularly with prolonged 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 storage.

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 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.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

NV2 power efficiency is fairly terrible, as expected. This will still be an unfortunately popular drive for laptops as it’s single-sided and dirt cheap. If this drive isn’t regularly pushed, and it shouldn’t be, it may be passable with its power usage, but there are many better options.

Normally with QLC-based drives we won’t see throttling because the QLC mode is too slow. The 2TB NV2 runs hot, though, another characteristic of its controller since it’s 28nm technology. The drive idled at 56C by IR and 37C in SMART, a wide deviation between measurements, then hit 86C and 70C, respectively, after roughly 500GB of sustained writes. At this point the drive began to throttle.

These temperatures make it difficult to recommend for laptop use. While it takes a lot of writes to get the drive to throttle, the high idle temperature is concerning. A heatsink is recommended for other use.

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.

Conclusion

The Kingston NV2 is simply not a drive we can recommend in most cases because the range of hardware it can have makes it too risky for the buyer. You could get the great SM2269XT or the mediocre SM2267XT controller. You could get BiCS5 TLC or much slower QLC. None of these will have DRAM and it’s probably unfair to call this a PCIe 4.0 drive on top of all that. 

In testing, the drive also ran hot even when idle and it draws a decent amount of power, making it less than ideal for many machines, including laptops. Its saving grace is its amazing price, which does make it perhaps good for something other than a primary drive.

Despite this, you may not want to roll the dice and hope you get lucky. It is probably better to approach it from a worst-case perspective: this is a budget drive designed to be a cheap way to add more NVMe-class storage. If you have worked with the A400 or NV1, then you know what to expect with the NV2. Many motherboards come with their own M.2 heatsinks or shields, which can also help alleviate any heat problems this drive might have, mitigating one of its downsides.

Our samples both use the SMI SM2267XT controller which did not perform well with either TLC or QLC. The flash, in either case, is actually not bad. It’s just that there are so many better options on the market. Pricing really is the ultimate factor here that you must consider when looking at the NV2. It may be okay for a gaming drive if it’s priced competitively against SATA alternatives, but this implies you want higher capacity. At lower capacities it’s simply a way to upgrade an old machine cheaply - but we did not review those SKUs.

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It gets tough for newcomers to capture a sizeable share of the solid-state drive market away from well-known brands, which is why Kingston and Adata have led retail SSD shipments for years. But apparently, Gigabyte became one of the Top 10 retail SSD suppliers after only a few years on the market.

SSD shipments through global distribution channels reached 127 million units in 2021, up 11% year-over-year, despite shortages of controllers and power management ICs, according to TrendForce. 42% of these shipped drives were from companies that make their 3D NAND memory (Kioxia, Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Western Digital). In contrast, the remaining 58% encompasses companies focused purely on SSD assembly. TrendForce's retail SSD rankings only count the latter category of 'pure play' SSD producers.

In retail, brand strength matters, which is why Kingston, Adata, Kimtigo, Lexar, and Transcend have been in TrendForce's list of Top 10 makers of SSDs sold in retail or inside custom-built PCs for ages. But Kingston's share dropped a bit in 2021 to 26%, probably because there were just many players addressing segments that Kingston has addressed. On the other hand, other top 3 makers strengthened their positions, according to TrendForce. Lexar, which currently has nothing to do with Micron, sits at No. 4 with a 6% share. Netac sits just a little below Lexar.

Meanwhile, after only a few years in the game and multiple drives that ended in our best SSDs list, Gigabyte found itself in the No. 9 place with a 3% market share. Colorful, just like Kimtigo, is primarily oriented on China and is even higher with a 4% share. Finally, Powev is another new Top 10 entrant with a 4% share.

Hundreds of companies supply solid-state drives today as SSDs are relatively easy to produce, and the market is growing. But because there are so many names around, the competition is cut-throat as everyone is trying to offer the best price, highest quality, and highest performance. For obvious reasons, companies that produce their 3D NAND memory have an advantage over pure-play SSD houses as they have their chips and know how they behave. They know how to ensure consistently high performance of drives that use their memory.

But while it is hard to compete against makers of 3D NAND in terms of price, some specialists successfully produce high-speed drives. Companies like Corsair, G.Skill, Patriot, Sabrent, and TeamGroup may not be in the Top 10 list of the largest retail SSD makers by unit shipments. However, they still serve their loyal customer base that demands two things only: performance and quality.

Gigabyte has published a list of unannounced DDR5 memory modules boasting extremely high data transfer rates, including 7000 MT/s, 7200 MT/s, and 7400 MT/s. The modules should be available from various brands, including Gigabyte's own Aorus division, Adata, and Kingston. Unfortunately, the memory sticks will require high voltages and slip into systems powered by high-end motherboards.

As it turns out, Gigabyte's top-of-the-range Z790 Aorus Master platform supports (as noticed by @momomo_us) DDR5-6800 CL34, DDR5-7000 CL32, DDR5-7200 CL34, and DDR5-7400 CL34 modules from Adata, Corsair, Gigabyte Aorus, and Kingston. These 16GB modules are based on SK hynix A and SK Hynix M memory devices and require 1.4V, 1.45V, or 1.5V voltages. In addition, these modules feature XMP 3.0 profiles for one-click overclocking and are designed to work in pairs, so Gigabyte does not guarantee that four of such modules will work flawlessly.

Intel's 13th Generation Core 'Raptor Lake' processors seem to have higher overclocking potential in general and memory overclocking potential in particular than their predecessors, which is why it looks like DDR5-7000+ memory modules will be available from numerous manufacturers.

So far, only TeamGroup has formally introduced its 32GB DDR5-7200 CL34 dual-channel kits. In contrast, other suppliers of high-speed memory modules are testing their products with all Intel Z790-based motherboards that will become available shortly. Meanwhile, Gigabyte has tested its flagship motherboard with several manufacturers' high-end modules.

Speaking of high-end memory module suppliers, they should probably be eager to release their highest-performing memory sticks as soon as possible to offset lost revenue and profits caused by softening demand for PCs among consumers.

While all of the high-performance DRAM sticks tested by Gigabyte with its Z790 Aorus Master mainboard will likely be among the best RAM, there is one crucial thing to note about them. 1.4V – 1.5V voltages for DDR5 memory modules represent a 27% – 36% overvoltage compared to the JEDEC standard, which is a significant increase and will inevitably affect memory ICs and Intel's memory controller. We do not know the longevity of these memory modules and Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs, but significant overclocking usually also means a tradeoff between performance and longevity.

Unfortunately, it is unclear when Adata, Corsair, Gigabyte Aorus, G.Skill, and Kingston will release their DDR5-6800 CL34, DDR5-7000 CL32, DDR5-7200 CL34, and DDR5-7400 CL34 modules and how much will they cost.

Kingston's IronKey Vault Privacy 80 External SSD is a portable SSD with an attractive full-featured touchscreen that controls many customizable options that keep your data safe. The drive comes with up to 1.92TB of QLC flash storage backed by hardware encryption, conveniently includes Type-A and Type-C cables, and like the drives on our list of best external SSDs, is compatible with most operating systems and devices. However, because this is a specialized device that's focused on data security, these advantages come at the cost of performance and a thick price tag.

The IronKey may be up your alley if you want secure storage in your pocket that’s faster than a hard drive or slower forms of flash storage, such as SD cards and USB flash drives. It’s certainly attractive, and the built-in touchscreen makes the drive’s security functions easy to use. However, such convenience comes at a price, as the drive will run you several hundred dollars at any capacity. Kingston also made some compromises in the performance department.

Most other portable SSDs don’t offer built-in security functions, aside from perhaps Samsung’s T7 Touch, and software-based solutions remain a viable option. Of course, the whole idea is to have reliable and portable storage, but performance can vary widely depending on the interface.

The IronKey relies on the slowest USB 3.2 Gen 1x1 connection, but just how far does it fall behind the competition? Encryption comes with a performance cost, but ultimately Kingston made design decisions that may have you reconsider the value of the added security.

Specifications

The Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 External SSD is available at 480GB, 960GB, and 1.92TB. These capacities suggest additional over-provisioning, reducing available user space to leave extra for the controller to improve write performance and flash endurance. This makes sense given the purpose and characteristics of the drive. The IronKey is a bit heftier than many portable SSDs, in part because it has an embedded touchscreen for its security functions. Kingston backs this unit with a three-year warranty, which is a bit anemic given the price.

Speaking of price, you'll pay significantly more for the security options, like the FIPS 197-compliant 256-bit XTS-AES encryption. This encryption meets the Common Criteria EAL5+ standard (Evaluation Assurance Level 5 with one or more additions to the base rating). The randomizable, color touchscreen has a multi-password option with PIN or passphrase, from 6-64 alphanumeric characters, with a configurable amount of access attempts and an auto-timeout. The drive also supports a dual read-only mode for write protection to protect against compromised systems and malware, plus the ability to Secure Erase the drive by wiping the encryption key.

You might be dismayed to see the performance limitations — the drive offers up to
250 MBps for sequential reads and writes. This makes sense for a variety of reasons. One is that on-the-fly hardware encryption does have some overhead and performance limitations, even with the dedicated encryption microcontroller. Because performance is already limited, Kingston can save cost when selecting the SATA-to-USB bridge chip, which in this case has a hard limit of 3Gbps SATA. We’ll look at these respective components a bit below. Due to these limitations, the USB interface is USB 3.2 Gen 1, or 5Gbps.

Given all these considerations, the price-per-GB is best at 1.92TB and worst at 480GB. Based on this ratio, we would recommend the 960GB and 1.92TB SKUs.

Software and Accessories

The IronKey comes with both Type-C to Type-C and Type-C to Type-A USB cables. The drive comes with a nice carrying pouch made of neoprene, which does offer some protection. The drive has built-in software, accessible through the touchscreen, for its various functions and settings. Unfortunately, while Kingston does offer downloadable SSD Manager software on its website, it doesn't support USB enclosures/devices.

A Closer Look

The front of the IronKey has a nice color touchscreen. The blue case color is attractive. The USB-C port resides on the bottom, which is convenient. On the backside, a label lists pertinent specifications about the drive: model, capacity, power draw, etc. There’s also a screw that allows for opening of the enclosure, covered by a “warranty void if removed” sticker.

Inside we have what appears to be a Kingston A400 SATA SSD attached to a SATA-to-USB adapter, with a USB-C output and PCB beneath the drive. There are four screws to hold the bay in place and another four for the drive cover — including another warranty warning sticker. The touchscreen has a ribbon connecting the screen to the board, and we can see a few prominent integrated circuits (IC) on the PCB.

The first chip is labeled MB86C311A, which is a Fujitsu MB86C31 USB 3.0-SATA Bridge IC. This bridge chip is USB 3.2 Gen 1, or 5Gbps, on one side and SATA 2.0, or 3Gbps, on the other. Actual throughput on the SATA side is significantly lower than 3Gbps due to encoding and transfer overhead, with an approximate maximum of 270MBps. This chip does support the USB-attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) for better performance and other functions. The chip is based on an ARM Cortex-M processor, specifically the M3, a processor that's also used for offloaded functions in Crucial’s custom SSD controllers, like the Crucial P5 and P5 Plus SSDs. The -1A model of this chip has integrated AES encryption hardware.

The other IC is an STM32L, or STMicroelectronics STM32 microcontroller. The STM32 is based on Arm’s Cortex-M series of processors, designed to be low-cost and low-power for various applications. In this case, it’s likely used to manage the integrated touchscreen. 

Self-Encrypting Drives (SED) have an encryption module as part of the controller ASIC while the IronKey has a separate chip for AES - a chip that also acts as a SATA-USB bridge. Unfortunately, this chip introduces a performance bottleneck in the drive.

The flash is labeled FB51208UCN1, indicating these are 8-bit, 512GB NAND modules (two for a total of 1TB). We recognize this designation as similar to the flash used in Kingston’s NV1, which used 64-layer Intel/Micron QLC. We suspect that Kingston uses QLC here as well, which is not egregious as the drive is bandwidth-limited from the get-go. Verifying this flash with a utility is possible, but looking at the sustained write response can also be informative. This and other drives may utilize the 96-layer variety depending on supply.

The DRAM-less Silicon Motion SM2259XT SATA controller manages the flash. This SSD controller is found in many popular drives, like Crucial’s BX500, as an update to the original SM2258XT. The primary difference is improved LDPC error correction, which improves performance and endurance. This first showed up when Crucial added QLC SKUs to its BX500 lineup as it’s a good pairing to get more out of 4-bit flash.

This four-channel controller is best with at least two dies per channel, so we recommend the 960GB or 1.92TB SKUs. This is especially true given the pricing we covered earlier. 

MORE: Best External SSDs and Hard Drives

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Comparison Products

We compared the 960GB Kingston IronKey to other popular portable drives at the same relative capacity. This includes drives with QLC flash, like the Inland Platinum External SSD and the Crucial X8. Samsung has its own security-focused portable SSD in the T7 Touch, but we’ve also included the newer T7 Shield. We also use the Kingston XS2000 to show what a hybrid controller with a 20Gbps interface can do. Finally, we also included the WD My Passport SSD and the SanDisk Extreme v2.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

Unsurprisingly, the IronKey doesn't do too well in this test, although it still manages to beat the Inland Platinum External. The Platinum External uses a hybrid controller (flash controller and bridge, all in one), which is intended to be cheaper and more power-efficient. It also uses comparable QLC flash.

The drives with TLC and/or faster controllers do better in this test than both drives. This is one place where Kingston's XS2000 does quite well.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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 IronKey does not do well in PCMark, limited by its lack of bandwidth, the use of QLC, and possibly encryption overhead. Its latency is even worse than the Platinum External’s, which scored poorly due to the embedded controller QLC flash. The X8, which uses a dedicated controller with DRAM, stands on top.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The IronKey is doomed to do poorly in DiskBench as it is bandwidth-limited by its bridge chip and USB interface. It finishes dead last, and not by a small amount.

Synthetic Testing - CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tool that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The IronKey has no hope of keeping up in CrystalDiskMark’s sequential read and write tests as, again, it’s inherently limited by the 3Gbps SATA bottleneck. You probably aren’t purchasing this drive for speed, though. The IronKey's performance in random workloads is also poor due to overhead — encryption likely adds to the latency — although it's certainly better than lesser forms of storage such as USB flash drives. It’s good enough for occasional transfers where security is paramount.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery, and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.

The IronKey writes at its maximum possible speed, around 260 MB/s until it runs out of pSLC cache. This appears to be one-quarter of the drive, implying QLC, meaning that all of the flash can run in single-bit mode with a corresponding loss of capacity. After this, the drive performance declines to about 40MBps on average, which is certainly slow enough to suggest that the drive is folding data from pSLC to the native QLC. Considering the drive is slow to begin with, you really don’t want to hit this performance state. It’s the slowest drive in the round-up for sustained writes.

Drives with large SLC caches usually have fast cache recovery, particularly if the cache is hiding poor native performance, like when the drive uses QLC. A large, dynamic SLC cache with fast recovery can have additive wear as blocks are necessarily rewritten when moved from pSLC to QLC. The IronKey’s large cache should be enough to absorb typical write workloads, but you should be aware that it’s not made for constant writing at full capacity like the T7 Shield.

Temperatures were not something to be concerned with, as the drive proved to be too slow to generate sufficient heat to get anywhere near throttling limits.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket 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.

Conclusion

The Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 External SSD has two things going for it: portability and security. The problem is that you'll pay a lot for those privileges, in money and other ways. The IronKey is very expensive when looking at its cost-per-GB, particularly at its lowest capacity; this is a drive you should only get at 960GB or 1.92TB. Even then, you’re making a lot of compromises for what is admittedly fairly robust and customizable data security.

These sacrifices come in the form of performance and, to some extent, endurance. Performance is hampered by the use of a DRAM-less controller, a SATA-USB bridge chip that's limited to 3Gbps, a 5Gbps USB interface, and the use of an older QLC flash. While all of these design decisions make sense given the bridge’s bottleneck, which may be due to encryption overhead, it’s a tough pill to swallow when you’re paying this much for the drive. Endurance is also likely hurt by using QLC and a DRAM-less controller, not to mention the massive SLC cache.

The IronKey is attractive with a nice touch-screen that is full of functionality. The drive has a carrying case and both types of USB cables, which is nice, and the on-drive controls improve compatibility. There are myriad security options and protections for you to dial in to your liking, and it’s all supported in hardware. This makes it a bit of a unique device, so you have to personally decide if it’s worth all the drawbacks of increased price and lacking performance. 

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Inland's Platinum External SSD looks to put the company's stamp on the portable drive market. This drive from Inland, Micro Center’s in-house SSD brand, is another “P” model, as in Platinum, but it diverges from the company's typical drives by being particularly portable, making it a contender for our list of best external SSDs.

We’ve reviewed plenty of Inland drives over the years, with varying results. The drives do have some common themes, though: no frills, competitive warranty, and cheaper pricing. Inland often uses the same hardware as other manufacturers but offers no software. However, you can pick up their drives in a physical store — if you happen to live near a Micro Center — which can be convenient for many PC builders. This drive is more oriented at laptop or portable users who need a quick, efficient way to transport data, basically serving as a more substantial USB flash drive.

It will be interesting to see how this drive holds up against traditional portable SSDs, like the Samsung T7 Shield, as well as other embedded solutions like the Kingston XS2000.

Inland Platinum External SSD Specifications

The Inland Platinum External SSD comes in 500GB and 1TB capacities. Speeds stretch up to 1.1/1.0 GBps of sequential read/write throughput, matching the 10 Gbps interface. (Micro Center’s site has it the other way around, different than the Amazon listing, but reads are typically faster than writes.)

The Platinum's pricing is actually pretty good compared to other portable 10 Gbps NVMe SSDs. However, the hardware is devised to offer a budget solution, so temper your expectations if you’re looking at this product. It’s likely good for basic storage and decent in read workloads and bursty write workloads, but not much else.

Inland offers a four-year warranty with this drive. The drive is small and bus-powered; the former characteristic is a nice bonus if you really need portability. That’s especially true as Phison has designed the U17 controller to be low-power, making it nice for use with battery-limited laptops.

Software and Accessories

The SSD comes with short USB Type-C to Type-C and Type-C to Type-A cables. This allows the device to be used with pretty much any system under the sun. Obviously, speeds will be reduced with a 5 Gbps host port. As with Inland’s other drives, there are no frills here. Some users might get this drive for archival use or backups, requiring them to grab free software.

A Closer Look

Internally, portable SSDs are normally an entry-level NVMe drive coupled with a USB interface thanks to a separate bridge chip. However, hybrid controllers are becoming more common, like the Phison U17 solution in this device and the SMI SM2320 that we recently examined in the Kingston XS2000. Of course, a 20 Gbps Phison variant — using the faster U18 sibling of this drive’s controller — would be better for comparing sequential performance.

This type of configuration has benefits as the design is streamlined. The drive will pull less power and can be less cumbersome in size, although it can no longer be used internally in a PC. This does mean that a failure will render the entire thing inoperable versus just having to replace a drive or an enclosure. These solutions are, of course, also DRAM-less and may not be as generally performant as traditional drives. Therefore, these designs are specialized, but this is not a new concept as with client BGA SSDs.

The Inland Platinum External’s case is plain, but at least it is easy to open. The LED indicator on top flashes white to show I/O activity. You’re just four screws away from the inside, which unfortunately means there’s no real cooling to be had. We’ll see later if this is an issue. Internally, the 1TB model has two NAND packages — one on either side — plus the DRAM-less Phison U17 controller. The interface is USB-C. As this controller is embedded, meaning there is no separate bridge chip, so the drive is not shuckable.

The Phison U17 controller is a single solution for portable SSDs. Its sibling, the U18, has a faster 20 Gbps interface. Both controllers are 2-channel, but bus speeds are 800 MT/s and 1400 MT/s for the U17 and U18, respectively. We can picture these as similar to SMI’s SM2320, a controller we have reviewed in more than one product. Phison emphasizes that this native UFD controller is far more efficient than having a separate bridge chip. This makes sense since that latter configuration tends to come with a beefier 4-channel controller as well.

Looking at the bus speeds, we can translate 800 MT/s into 800 MB/s per channel, although this will be considerably lower after overhead (addressing, commands, etc.), especially for write traffic. Nevertheless, the two-channel design is sufficient to reach the maximum speeds as limited by the USB interface with 1TB or less of capacity. That also applies to the U18 with its faster bus speed, which additionally allows for higher capacities because the flash will often run at a lower rate. However, sustained performance might be worse for wear on a two-channel design, as we will test.

The flash is labeled IA7HG67AWA, which appears to be 96-layer QLC from Micron. This flash is popular on some drives driven by Phison’s E12S and E16 controllers, and it is also prominent in Intel’s 665p. Intel has since released 144-layer QLC flash with its 670p and, moreover, flash manufacturers are all working on their own 176-layer QLC, including Crucial/Micron which already has products on the market. Clearly, this is a budget-oriented device using older flash.

Micro Center lists this drive as coming with TLC. When asking an Inland representative about the flash, they quickly confirmed my suspicions that it was QLC. This may seem like an egregious mistake particularly as QLC is best at higher capacities. However, this is a two-channel device and QLC is more than adequate at 1TB. It may be a worthwhile trade-off for the tiny size and cheaper per-GB price.

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Comparison Products

We compare the 1TB Inland Platinum External SSD to the Samsung T7 Shield and T7 Touch, the WD Black P50 and My Passport SSD, the Crucial X8, the SanDisk Extreme v2, and the Kingston XS2000. All of these are at 1TB of capacity. We already mentioned that the T7 and XS2000 are interesting drives to compare as they let us see what Phison can do with an integrated controller design.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

The Platinum External comes in dead last when it comes to FFXIV loading times. This isn't surprising given the two-channel controller design and QLC flash. The XS2000 with SMI’s four-channel design and TLC flash takes first place. 

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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.

In general, performance is pretty poor here. The Platinum External again lands in last place and can’t even catch the 10 Gbps Samsung T7 drives. This is a limitation of the internal hardware.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

This bandwidth-heavy test essentially measures the sequential interface speed. As such, the Platinum External falls in line with the other 10 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2x1) portable SSDs.

Synthetic Testing - CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tool that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

CrystalDiskMark’s sequential tests perform as expected. Similar to the DiskBench tests above, the interface speed limits the drives. Inland could release a 20 Gbps variant of this drive, if it so desired, to compete with the products using SMI’s SM2320 hybrid controller, albeit with half the channels.

The random I/O results are more interesting, particularly in regard to write performance. While neither the Platinum External nor XS2000 do well with high queue depth random reads, the former performs adequately at queue depth 1. That does tend to be an important metric for general use. Moreover, both drives have strong queue depth 1 random write performance. This is due to a lower base latency as the controllers do not have to go through a separate bridge chip.

Considering these controllers are also more power-efficient, this is of interest to those who may need to copy a lot of small files on the go. Generally, the SLC caches are sufficiently large on these types of drives and can absorb that type of incoming workload without issue.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery, and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.

The Inland Platinum writes at around 1.08 GBps for almost 250 seconds, suggesting an SLC cache size of up to 266GB. All of this drive’s native flash is likely being used in pSLC mode - meaning a quarter of the total capacity. After the SLC runs out, the sustained write performance goes as low as 50 MBps or below. This is not unexpected with a 2-channel design utilizing QLC given such a large, dynamic SLC cache. This drive is clearly better designed for reads and bursty write workloads rather than sustained writes.

The Samsung T7 Shield was designed for sustained write performance, clearly shown here. The XS2000, on the other hand, has a faster interface and, therefore, a higher maximum SLC write speed, which is followed by very poor TLC write speeds. These embedded, portable SSD designs naturally have this type of performance. It is a weakness but also a reasonable compromise if the user never sees the edge cases in normal use.

SLC cache recovery was relatively rapid. Phison states that the U17 controller has a built-in thermal sensor with 70C being the upper boundary during operation. After sustained writes, we saw a high temperature of around 66C with the surface hitting 38C, both within reason. This drive could use better cooling, though, perhaps with thermal padding and a more thermally-conductive surface material.

Samsung designed the T7 Shield to remain within specification even in hotter climates, whereas this drive may have more serious concerns in such an environment. That being said, it’s unlikely to be used for sustained writes where the temperature becomes a problem, and once it exceeds the SLC cache, it will be too slow to throttle anyway. Therefore, adding thermal padding is more of an option for DIY users who want extra security.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket 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.

Conclusion

Perhaps it would be better to see this drive as kind of a chunky USB flash drive. In fact, there are flash drive-sized SSDs on the market, including some that use the same controller. Some USB flash drive controllers are also two-channel, of course. The U18 simply offers better peak performance and is paired with better-quality flash than what you find on USB flash drives. That makes this even more of a niche product, but one that can find limited use - perhaps as part of a wider toolbox for on-the-go users.

The first thing we have to mention is errors in this drive’s product listing. The sequential read and write metrics do not seem correct, even if we had no trouble pushing the limits of 10 Gbps for both during testing; they’re listed differently on Micro Center’s site and Amazon. Further, and more seriously, Micro Center lists this drive as coming with TLC flash. This is more common than some users might realize — it’s not uncommon to find drives that say they have TLC or DRAM when the internal hardware varies.

This is disappointing coming from Inland. The representative was quick to confirm our QLC suspicions, and the use of QLC is not generally detrimental given this drive’s intended use. The overall design is, at least, conducive to using QLC at 1TB. This drive is especially small, power-efficient, and cheaper, which makes QLC a fair compromise, although buyers may not be happy about the NAND mixup.

That said, this is a bit of a niche product. It’s perfect for someone who is doing mostly reads with some bursty writes. Or someone who needs something small and efficient. This is particularly true for laptop and mobile users. Videographers will want to step up to the T7 Shield for ruggedness and sustained performance, and those wanting higher performance need a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 or Thunderbolt portable SSD instead. This drive is minimalist and cannot be shucked, so be aware of what you’re getting with it.

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Kingston's latest encrypted external SSD is designed to be as friendly for consumers to use as it is devilish for hackers to try and crack.  The new Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 External SSD VP80ES unlocks like a smartphone, with its intuitive touchscreen, and then enables simple drag-and-drop file transfers. Meanwhile, hackers face a FIPS 197 certified OS-independent device which safeguards against Brute Force attacks and BadUSB with digitally-signed firmware and XTS-AES 256-bit encryption.

Many storage devices you can buy nowadays come with some kind of encryption tools bundled, or if not you can use BitLocker (might be an extra to pay for depending on your version of Windows). However, some of the software is OS specific, or it will require you complete a number of preparatory tasks some users will be tempted to put off until 'later'. Kingston reckons its IronKey Vault Privacy 80 External SSD VP80ES addresses all these weaknesses, and is a friction free alternative to secure data storage needs for any platform.

The first thing you will notice about the VP80ES is its handy compact shape is dominated by a color touch screen on one side. You will mostly be interacting with the touch screen to unlock the drive after plugging it into your computer or other smart device. In many of the pictures you can see a numpad for inputting a passcode or PIN. You can flip to text input to use a password or phrase instead (6-64 characters). As well as unlocking the device you will use the touchscreen for setup / configuration, and it will display useful status messages.

Some specifics about passcode and passphrase access provided by Kingston include the fact that there are multi-level password options. Specifically, you can set up admin and user passwords. It has an option to respond to brute-force attacks by crypto-erasing the drive "if the Admin and User passwords are entered incorrectly 15 times." Users can set this data destruction to kick in at their own choice of between 10 and 30 wrong password attempts.

The drive is similarly protected against USB firmware shenanigans. The publicity materials for the VP80ES mention it is protected against BadUSB, which is a computer security attack method using a reprogrammed controller, often used to inject malicious code into the victim's device.

Another nice feature of this device is that it has a read-only mode which you can toggle. This is useful if you know you are only going to be reading data from the drive and not writing / saving anything. Read-only mode is a must if you are going to use this drive on any system you suspect of being compromised.

If someone were to remove the SSD from this device, they would find all data is obscured with FIPS 197 certified XTS AES 256-bit encryption.

With the security features discussed above, it is time to mention some of the standard portable SSD specs you will be familiar with. Firstly, the Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 External SSD is being made available in three capacities; 480GB, 960GB, and 1,920GB. The best performance you can get from this device is up to 250 MBps read, and the same for writes.

The drive has a USB 3.2 Gen1 port using a Type-C form factor, and the package includes both a Type-C to C and a Type-C to A cable, as well as a neoprene travel case. Kingston's VP80ES measures 122.5 x 84.2 x 18.5 mm but we don't have a weight. Buyers get a three year warranty. The 480GB, 960GB, and 1,920GB drives are listed by BHPhotoVideo at $437, $535, and $762 respectively, but they are waiting for stock expected within a fortnight.

The WD Black D30 is simply designed external storage for your games without any frills like RGB. It will work on modern consoles as well as PC, whether macOS or Windows, but is aimed at older titles for use on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The variant we are testing today is for the Xbox and comes with a Game Pass Ultimate code to get your gaming journey started.

This drive is recommended for last-generation titles, because the current consoles have high-bandwidth NVMe drives and their recommended expansion options are also quite fast. 10 Gbps USB won’t cut it for that. On PC, DirectStorage is still in its infancy, but that API is designed for NVMe anyway. That being said, 10 Gbps is sufficient bandwidth for normal game loading, and the D30’s 2TB option is particularly compelling to hold a game collection.

WD’s original SN550 and its SanDisk counterpart made for a solid portable drive when paired with an enclosure. WD thought so, too, as they made models with this hardware and the ASM2362 bridge chip. While these drives are DRAM-less and HMB does not pass over USB, the overall design was such that sustained performance remained quite good. We will have to test the D30 to see if it holds up to that. Many manufacturers have been “nerfing” drives lately, including the SN550, so we’ll see what separates the D30 from its peers.

Specifications

The WD Black D30 is available at 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities. The price per gigabyte goes from $0.16 to $0.09 as the capacity increases, making the 2TB the best value. Games are always getting larger, so that may be the best investment regardless. While internally the drive is in the typical M.2 2280 form factor, externally the drive is attached by USB via the USB-C port with an included Type-C to Type-A cable. Although somewhat bulky, the drive is a relatively lightweight 125 grams.

The drive is not rated in any special way but comes with a stand and is bus-powered. The casing does seem thick, so it should offer some protection. As the drive is limited by the USB 3.1 interface, that is 10 Gbps SuperSpeed+, it’s only rated for up to 900 MBps with regard to sequential reads and writes. The warranty is unexceptional at three years.

Software and Accessories

The D30 arrives with a stand and a single USB Type-C to Type-A cable. Software should not be required for console use. A Type-C to Type-C cable would have been a nice inclusion for PC and Mac users, although strictly speaking it is not necessary. As mentioned above, the drive also comes with a Game Pass Ultimate code.

A Closer Look

The WD D30 comes in a utilitarian (but not unattractive) black and white casing. It’s likely the casing would provide some protection to the SSD inside, but it seems larger than necessary. The case has a single USB-C port and a status indicator LED. Details about the drive, such as the capacity, are written on the side. This particular color scheme is for the Xbox version that we received for testing; there’s also a pure-black model.

The internal structure does seem to have some ruggedness to it. There is a green PCB to facilitate the M.2 NVMe-to-USB-C conversion. The internal drive appears to be a WD SN550.

A closer look at the drive confirms our expectations as we spot SanDisk’s 20-82-10023-A1 controller, which is used by the SN550 and SN570. This is a DRAM-less, 4-channel design. Besides the PMIC, we also spot the flash - SanDisk 060523, as utilized on the original SN550. This would be 96-layer BiCS4 TLC from Kioxia, with 512Gbit or 64GB dies in a 1TB package for a 16DP configuration.

The bridge chip is the ASMedia ASM2362, a popular alternative to JMicron’s JMS583 and Realtek’s RTL9210B. This bridges x2 PCIe 3.0 to USB 3.1 at 10Gbps. Most 20 Gbps portable drives utilize its faster sibling, the ASM2364. ASMedia lists the ASM2362 as USB3.1 Gen2 (USB 3.1) which is SuperSpeed+ and is equivalent to USB3.2 Gen 2x1. This has more than twice the bandwidth of SuperSpeed 5 Gbps, or USB 3.0 (USB Gen 3.2 1x1) due to improved encoding.

Basically, the chip has two lanes of PCIe 3.0 on the drive side and a 10 Gbps interface on the USB side, for a performance peak around 900 MBps in this case. The JMS583 is popular in many “DIY” enclosures but had early firmware issues, while the Realtek RTL9210B is often considered the best of the bunch. The RTL9210B, though, does have the advantage of working with SATA drives.

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Comparison Products

The WD Black D30 1TB will be compared to other external drives we've tested, including the Samsung X5, the Kingston XS2000, the SanDisk Extreme v2, WD’s My Passport SSD, Crucial's X8, WD’s P50, and Samsung’s T7 Touch, all at 1TB. This lineup includes a variety of controllers, flash, and bridge chips.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

This is sold as a gaming drive, so loading times are important. That being said, there’s only so much to be gained by going to a faster SSD, especially once you hit NVMe drives. Of course, the external interface can still be limiting. Here the D30 does adequately, but is far from the best.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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 D30 does fairly well here, sticking with the middle of the pack. The X8, which has DRAM, is on top, while Samsung’s DRAM-less T7 Touch disappoints.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

This bandwidth-limited test shows the 10 Gbps drives more or less in a pack. with the faster interface drives pulling ahead. Most notable here is that the D30 falls behind with writes, which will be investigated further below.

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.

ATTO mirrors DiskBench’s results, being limited by the interface. CrystalDiskMark also demonstrates this with its sequential tests. The D30 does beat the T7 Touch and XS2000 - the latter with a DRAM-less, hybrid controller - with 4K random reads. Factoring in writes though, it only beats the T7 Touch. We can assume the D30 is read-optimized and likely intended to have poor write performance given that it’s meant to be a gaming drive and not for portable transfers.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.

The D30 writes at around 800 MBps for approximately 16 seconds, indicating an SLC cache of 12-13GB. This matches our expectation from the SN550, which tends to have around 12.5GB of static pSLC. Static SLC usually makes for more consistent post-SLC performance, and in this case it is also very fast to recover. This cache will not shrink and 12GB should be enough for small write bursts.

After the cache runs out, the D30 drops down to around 220 MBps. This is of course far lower than what we saw with both the original and new 1TB SN550s, although direct-to-TLC performance remains consistent otherwise. This seems to indicate that, indeed, the D30 is not intended for sustained writes but is instead a drive designed to store and read games. This is therefore not a drive that should be repurposed or shucked.

The D30 only hit around 60C, by SMART, after a 350GB transfer. This should be well below throttling, which is not surprising given the environment and reduced write performance.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket 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.

Conclusion

The WD Black D30 neither surprises nor truly disappoints. We know what to expect from an SN550 and a 10 Gbps bridge chip by now. This drive is designed to be simple, and it is. It’s designed to store games, and that’s what it does. That latter point suggests that this drive is best at higher capacities, particularly 2TB, and that’s what we would recommend. We won’t knock it at 1TB for that, but 500GB seems a bit impoverished when considering its price per gigabyte.

The performance results would suggest this drive underperforms expectations, which is true, but if you’re buying this to store games then these metrics don’t mean a whole lot. This drive would disappoint if repurposed for transfers or shucked. The write performance, particularly sequential and sustained, leaves much to be desired, especially after the good numbers we’ve seen from this hardware in the past. This means WD is selling this strictly for the gaming world and is not super concerned beyond that.

There are plenty of portable SSDs out there that will accomplish effectively the same thing and more. This is therefore a bit of a specialized SKU and it should be treated as such. There’s not a lot of frills like a five-year warranty, extra cables, RGB, etc. It’s just a basic drive designed to hold past-generation console games. The design is practical if uninspired and we have no real issues with the build quality, although it is excessively large. On the whole, this drive is unexciting, but it serves a purpose.

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When you think of ECC (error correction code) memory, Kingston, Samsung, or Crucial are probably the first brands that cross your mind. There's an overabundance of memory vendors, but very few do business in the ECC market. Some may not know it, but Mushkin is one of the handful of companies that commercialize ECC memory kits, and it has some pretty good ones.

Mushkin advertises the Redline ECC Black DDR4-3600 as the world's first overclocked ECC memory kit, and that is true. However, ECC memory isn't prevalent outside the enterprise market, and manufacturers generally stick to JEDEC specifications, such as DDR4-2133, or some vendors even go up to DDR4-3200. Therefore, a DDR4-3600 ECC memory kit is undoubtedly a configuration you don't often see on the memory market. It does come in handy, though, given that AMD's Ryzen has always supported ECC and Intel has unlocked ECC memory support for its mainstream Alder Lake processors (provided you use a motherboard with the W680 chipset).

The Redline ECC memory modules come with a green PCB, which might be a letdown for some enthusiasts. Given that ECC memory primarily dwells in servers and workstations, the color of the PCB shouldn't be an issue for the majority of customers. However, a black PCB could have gone a long way with potential mainstream buyers looking to take advantage of Alder Lake or Ryzen's support for ECC memory. The Redline ECC checks in with a height of 38mm (1.5 inches), so it's friendly with most oversized CPU air coolers.

Mushkin equipped the Redline ECC with a lightweight aluminum heat spreader, which the brand calls Frostbyte. Unlike the company's other memory, the Redline ECC only comes in black or white. In addition, the heat spreader's top resembles a double helix, which looks pretty cool.

The Redline ECC Black arrives as a dual-channel memory kit with two 16GB memory modules. Each memory module has an eight-layer PCB and adheres to a single-rank design. Although Thaiphoon Burner couldn't pick up the integrated circuits (ICs) manufacturer, we suspect they're from Micron, given the single-rank structure and loose timings.

The memory modules run at DDR4-2666 at 19-19-19-43 natively. However, the XMP profile will configure them for DDR4-3600 with 16-19-19-39 timings and a 1.4V DRAM voltage. The required voltage is a bit high considering that there are DDR4-3600 memory kits with better timings at 1.35V. See our PC Memory 101 feature and How to Shop for RAM story for more on timings and frequency considerations.

Comparison Hardware

The Intel system employs the Intel Core i9-10900K and Asus ROG Maximus XII Apex, which operates on the 0901 firmware. On the opposite side, the AMD system consists of the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and the Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero. The latter is on the 3501 firmware. The MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Gaming Trio ensures no bottlenecks in our gaming RAM benchmarks.

Intel Performance

The Redline ECC Black ended up in the middle of the Intel application performance chart. The memory flaunted its muscle in the Microsoft Office workload. We doubt there will be widespread use of ECC memory in gaming systems. Nonetheless, the memory surprised us as it managed to take fourth place overall in our gaming benchmarks. 

AMD Performance

The AMD platform turned out to be the Redline ECC Black's Achilles heel. We observed a decline in overall application performance that found Mushkin's memory in the penultimate position. The memory kit didn't shine in any specific workload, either. Gaming performance was a tad worse than on the Intel platform.

Overclocking and Latency Tuning

It was hard to squeeze a hefty overclock out of the Redline ECC Black since the XMP voltage was already at 1.4V. However, upping the DRAM voltage to 1.45V quickly put us at DDR4-3800 with the exact rated timings for DDR4-3600.

Lowest Stable Timings

Being Micron ICs, we couldn't get the timings very low, even at 1.45V. We got the tRCD, tRP, and tRAS as low as 18-18-38 before the memory became unstable. The CAS Latency remained at 16 clock cycles.

Bottom Line

Mushkin used a single-rank design for the Redline ECC Black DDR4-3600 C16 memory modules, which affects the memory's performance on the Intel platform and has an even bigger impact on the AMD platform. It's a shame because the memory would have performed better if Mushkin had opted for a dual-rank structure. As a result, the Redline ECC Black DDR4-3600 C16 kit cannot compete against enthusiast-grade memory kits like the G.Skill Trident Z Neo DDR4-3600 C16.

Mushkin's memory kit currently retails for $236.50. Yes, it's a bit more expensive than your standard DDR4-3600 C16 memory kit, and we expected that since it's ECC memory, after all. However, the Redline ECC Black DDR4-3600 C16 certainly has a spot in the market, offering enthusiasts an ECC option that's better than the standard ECC memory at DDR4-2133 or DDR4-2666 with sloppy timings.

MSI Gaming Overclocking Team member Kovan Yang has managed to coax a stick of DDR5 to achieve DDR5-10004. In a system packing an Intel Core i9-12900KS, fixed to an MSI MEG Z690 Unify-X motherboard, Yang pushed a single 16GB stick of Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 RAM to 5,001.8 MHz (10,004 MT/s, DDR5-10004). Perhaps surprisingly, Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 isn't a top pick in our Best DDR5 RAM benchmarks hierarchy.

The MSI OC Team DDR5 overclocking achievement is significant, as it is the first to poke its nose over the 5,000 MHz / DDR5-10000 threshold. For reference, the second place DDR5 frequency record holder is Lupin_no_musume with 4779.7 MHz, followed by Safedisk with 4,756.6 MHz, and Hicookie with 4,501.6 MHz, with the rest of the top 10 floundering below.

The HWBot overclocking submission page shares some of the details of the technique used by Yang to achieve this world record DDR5 overclock. For these kinds of record attempts it seems like the current best practice is to use a single stick of 16GB DDR5 RAM. This DDR5-10004 achievement relied on Kingston Fury Beast DDR5.

The overclocking details suggest the CPU was liquid nitrogen cooled, but there is no specific cooling method specified for the RAM. As other top 10 entrants sometimes note that LN2 is used to cool the RAM, it is quite certain this is the case with Kovan Yang's submission too - given the extreme speeds involved.

Elsewhere it is notable that MSI's overclocker has downclocked the CPU to just 425 MHz. Other charting overclockers in this category have quite slow running CPUs, but we noticed second placed Lupin_no_musume had overclocked their 12900K by 10%.

MSI seems to be rather proud of this achievement by their in-house overclocking team member. The motherboard at the heart of the record breaking system was the MSI MEG Z690 Unify-X. The MEG Z690 Unify range is claimed to embody stealthy looks with ultimate performance. We have recently shared in-depth reviews of the $489 MSI MEG Z690 Unify (ATX), as well as the diminutive $399 MSI MEG Z690I Unify (ITX), but not had the Unify-X through the labs as yet.

Other key components in Kovan Yang's rig that we have had in for review include the Intel Core i9-12900KS, which was released less than a month ago. And we had a very close look at a Kingston Fury Beast DDR5-5200 C40 memory kit, but our sample wasn't very receptive to our overclocking attempts. Needless to say, MSI's overclocking team will have had the chance to cherry-pick some of the best components for their overclocking fun and frolics.

The Inland Premium is rated for the typical PCIe 3.0 maximum of 3.4 GBps of bandwidth while topping out at 650,000 IOPS, which is pretty standard for SSDs based on Phison’s E12S controller. The Inland Premium stands out because it is based on a tried-and-true hardware configuration, has a six-year warranty, and you can actually snag the drive in person at a Micro Center.

We have recently reviewed other Inland drives - the Inland Prime and Gaming Performance Plus - comprising Micro Center’s in-house Inland SSD brand. As with the other drives, Inland takes the proven formula of a Phison controller and offers a convenient brick & mortar location for purchase and support.

While the Inland Premium is yet another E12S-based drive, it’s important to make sure there are no hidden surprises. Manufacturers have been keen to swap out hardware lately, and sometimes drives will fail in execution, underperforming expectations. However, in general, we know what to expect from this drive, and even if it’s a somewhat older model, it is still relevant in the market. We have not quite seen replacements in this segment with new controllers and flash — the four-channel SK hynix Gold P31 would be a single counterexample — because the existing hardware already gets the job done well. Let’s see if this drive meets our admittedly pedestrian expectations.

Specifications

The Inland Premium is rated for sequential speeds of up to 3.4/3.0 GBps read/write and up to 570K/650K random read/write IOPS. This drive is flexible in terms of capacity, available at 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. Current Micro Center pricing has the smallest and largest SKUs, 256GB and 4TB, at the highest relative cost, between $0.15 and $0.16 per gigabyte. 

The middle three SKUs are more effectively priced between $0.10-$0.12 per gigabyte. Due to fixed costs like the controller, small capacities tend to be more expensive. On the other hand, drives with an abundance of flash, as with the 4TB SKU, tend to carry a premium as well due to the challenges and limitations of implementing that much memory.

SSDs prices have been coming down in recent months and this is older hardware; hence, we expect competitive prices. The Inland Premium is priced a bit higher than some competitors, allowing for the fact that sales are not uncommon. Nevertheless, a savvy shopper can probably find something equivalent a bit cheaper, which puts this drive more into the convenience category. For many builders, being able to simply pick this up with other hardware at a local Micro Center is worth paying a bit more.

One thing Inland has been doing lately, as seen with our Inland Prime review, is offering a bit more than the typical warranty. Five-year warranties are quite common with drives of this caliber. Inland has taken to offering a six-year warranty instead. Typically the warranty period is more valuable than warrantied writes, or TBW, for the average consumer. That being said, many Phison drives also come with a high TBW, which is true here. The ability to get a reliable drive, conveniently, with a good warranty - that’s what Inland is all about.

Software and Accessories

Inland SSDs typically come with no fanfare, so you get generic packaging with no software. Luckily, there’s lots of good and free software available. Having an SSD toolbox would be nice but is not necessary for most users. Free monitoring software, like CrystalDiskInfo, is also commonly available. That being said, Inland could further streamline the user experience by offering OEM cloning software in the package. Offering generic Phison firmware updates is also a possible path, but we’re of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality.

A Closer Look

The Phison E12S SSD controller is a variant of the E12, which, by using a smaller package, can carry twice the number of flash chips on the PCB. Manufacturers migrated away from the E12 typically with a corresponding loss of DRAM, for example, going from 1GB to 512MB on a 1TB SKU. This controller is the foundation of tons of drives, and this one isn’t much different from the rest.

The E12/S and Silicon Motion’s SM2262/EN have been stalwarts in the SSD market for years, offering excellent performance and being used in tons of drives from dozens of manufacturers. Differences often come down to minor firmware optimizations, if anything, aside from variations in flash and DRAM. These are mature, reliable products. Phison tends to focus on scalability with their controllers, indicated by their use of CoX coprocessors, for example, with more balance in their design than the consumer-oriented SMI. With the E12, this is exemplified by the conservative cache design, which we will demonstrate below in our sustained write test.

The Inland Premium comes in the typical M.2 2280 form factor and the now-typical E12S layout. This layout includes a DRAM module, the svelter controller, and four NAND packages on the front. At 1TB, it isn’t necessary to include anything on the rear side. The front label is minimalistic but gets the job done. People often wonder if the label can or should be removed. The answer is, yes, you can remove it, but for the most part, leaving it on is ideal for the most part. This includes even for usage with a heatsink, although better contact can be made with the controller via the direct application of thermal padding.

We have already discussed the Phison E12S controller, although it’s worth stating that you can often get additional information from the chip. Visually we can see “2035,” which probably gives us the date of manufacture - the year 2020, week 35. Controllers may also have other revision information written on them. This is not important information for most users, but it can give you an idea of age, which is useful if there have been questionable batches.

The DRAM as provided by Kingston is labeled D1216ECMDXGJD, which, of course, can be looked up online. One quick way to get an idea of the DRAM configuration with Kingston DRAM is to look at the primary numbers, like 1216; this indicates 12(8)MB by 16 bit, or 256MB. The rest will tell us this is DDR3L, which pairs well with the E12S layout.

256MB of DRAM cache for a 1TB SSD is one-quarter of the typical ratio, and many E12S drives may have 512MB here, instead. In any case, does this matter? Certainly not for consumers, but one would be hard-pressed to see a need for more memory even with relatively heavy workloads. You eventually bump up against other bottlenecks or limitations. This isn’t a bad trade-off if one is balancing costs, and cost savings are one reason for the E12S switch. However, these savings should be passed to the customer, so it’s worth knowing the change.

The flash is labeled TABBG65AWV, which are 256GB packages of Kioxia’s 96-layer BiCS4 TLC. At 1TB, we have four of these packages. This flash tends to be 512Gb or 64GB per die, so four dies per package. Sixteen total dies allow for ample interleaving — two dies for each of the E12S’s eight channels. This flash is comparable to Micron’s 96-layer TLC, which comes in two variations, but typically, the B27B is utilized, although we prefer the Micron flash. The architectures are different, including a four-plane design with Micron’s flash, which can boost interleaving on lower-capacity SKUs.

As a side note, any given flash type can come in multiple densities, for example, 512Gb and 1Tb die with SK hynix’s 128-layer flash on their 1TB/2TB Gold P31 SKUs. While this does not directly impact the user, there can be performance ramifications depending on the choice — for example, with the v2 970 EVO Plus. The new variant surprised people by being slower with sequential writes post-SLC due to using denser, if newer, flash. Unfortunately, this led to many people assuming it is inferior when it is more complicated than that.

Moving forward, denser TLC will bump up the “sweet spot” for capacity. Still, newer four-channel controllers, like on the sleeper Western Digital SN770, can boost bus bandwidth to utilize interleaving better. A better example would be WD’s Green SN350 NVMe drive which seemingly has higher speeds on its larger-capacity QLC SKUs. In fact, this is likely due to higher bus speeds on the controller for those SKUs, with the lower-capacity TLC SKUs performing better outside of SLC.

Regardless, the Inland Premium does not challenge the paradigm here in any way, instead using a traditional combination. While the reduction in DRAM is something people may latch onto, one must consider that the 2TB 670p, for example, only has 256MB. Intel does have patents involving the compression of metadata which may reduce the DRAM load, but it isn’t likely that drive would benefit from more DRAM. Many 128MB drives on the market, usually Realtek-driven, have no problem here.

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Comparison Products

We compare the Inland Premium 1TB to similar PCIe 3.0 drives like the SK hynix Gold P31, the Inland Prime, the Samsung 980, and the Crucial P5. PCIe 4.0 options include the Kingston Fury Renegade, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, and the WD Black SN770. We have already tested many drives in this segment based on the E12/S and SM2262/EN. We want to see whether this configuration of hardware really makes sense given all the new options that are now available.

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.

The Inland Premium placed third out of eight in these tests, which is not hugely surprising. This test shows that newer DRAM-less solutions, like the 980 and SN770, can be effective.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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 Inland Premium placed seventh out of eight in all of these tests, albeit performing very close to the P5. We see newer PCIe 3.0 drives like the P31 performing better, but again some DRAM-less designs demonstrate that you don’t necessarily need DRAM these days.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

These tests are largely contingent on sequential bandwidth, clearly seen by the difference between PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 drives. How much is enough? For those that really want that burst bandwidth, PCIe 4.0 drives are the way to go. However, a fast PCIe 3.0 drive is clearly sufficient for most work. This arguably would include the Inland Prime.

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.

In ATTO the PCIe 4.0 drives again stand out with the rest of the pack, mostly together at a lower threshold.

Variations in these output lines are not generally expected, but do sometimes show up. Flash is organized by 16 kB physical pages but there are multiple dies per channel over multiple channels, and each die also has internal parallelization through planes. With sequential writes it’s preferred to write in tandem, which means opening a larger superpage. Controller management interacts with knowledge of this structure such that performance anomalies sometimes appear.

CrystalDiskMark offers no surprises, but we are a bit underwhelmed by the Inland Premium’s weak random read results. Random reads, especially at low queue depths and with minimal if any threading, tend to be a relevant metric for consumer or everyday usage. There are many potential reasons why the Inland Premium might be weak here, but of consideration is the age of the flash. The other drives in this list all have newer flash.

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 (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.

The Inland Premium 1TB writes at a maximum speed of approximately 3 GBps for around eight seconds, suggesting an SLC cache size of around 24GB. This is typical of most E12S-based drives. This cache is dynamic in the sense that it will diminish in size when the drive is fuller. However, it’s relatively conservative in size and operates much like a static cache. This means that post-SLC performance is consistent and, further, the cache is very quick to recover.

The direct-to-TLC write speed is around 1150 MBps, and we see no prominent folding state. This drive will write for days straight, although its TLC is on the slower side compared to newer flash. DRAM-less drives tend to have slower post-SLC performance, and we see the Inland Premium can outwrite most drives given enough time. For shorter bursts, larger caches and PCIe 4.0 speeds will outdo the Premium. That being said, this drive offers respectable performance for 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 storage.

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 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.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Remember that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

The Inland Premium does adequately with power consumption, with a particularly good result in idle testing. Consumer SSDs spend most of their lives idle, although the exact power state being hit depends on the machine. Certainly, power consumption is more important when running on battery power, as with a laptop or UPS. We see that this drive is not particularly efficient with a file copy which, at the very least, demonstrates that newer flash is more efficient. This is especially true with newer controllers, including DRAM-less ones, for example, made with a smaller process node.

When monitoring the drive temperature under sustained load for about 150GB of writes, we recorded a temperature of 74C with FLIR and 70C via the SMART sensor. The drive’s first threshold is 75C, so it’s possible we were bumping up against it; that is, the drive could have been beginning to throttle. Drive temperature with normal workloads and proper case ventilation should not be a problem; however, this SSD got warm enough that we would recommend a M.2 shield or heatsink if possible.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket 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.

Conclusion

The Inland Premium leverages a tried-and-true hardware configuration that’s been around for years in the typical E12S configuration. The amount of DRAM is less than typical but generally doesn’t hinder performance. There are no frills with this drive; for example, it comes without a heatsink or software. Its claim to fame is being widely available, particularly in Micro Center stores, with an extended six-year warranty. Why change something that works? This controller and flash combination is tested and true. For a long time, drives using this hardware configuration dominated the mainstream NVMe SSD market. With good reason - dozens of manufacturers put out drives using the E12/S or SM2262/EN controller. This generation of drives really made NVMe penetrate the consumer market after fits and starts with earlier drives like Intel’s 600p. Prices came down due to competition, not least as multiple types of flash were employed. Sabrent, for example, lists BiCS3/BiCS4/B27 on its page for its comparable Rocket. While swapping hardware has become an issue, the bottom line is that any user could pick up an affordable drive and have a reasonably good experience.

Inland is a good fit for this type of product as it’s easy to pick up storage in a Micro Center as part of a larger order, and it’s worth looking at how the old standard for SSD hardware holds up. We have discovered recently that newer drives — with 12nm controllers, faster bus speeds, newer flash and technology — really do offer all-new heights. “DRAM-less” used to be a bad word, but it’s clear that current and future drives can get by just fine with 64MB of host memory buffer in most cases, though there are certainly many caveats and exceptions. The point is that an older drive like this has stiff competition and must be priced accordingly.

As such, we feel the price is a little high, although the extra year of warranty is a nice bonus. We wouldn’t mind seeing Inland throw in OEM software or another goodie with these drives. There’s nothing special about this drive, but that’s not always a bad thing. However, there are likely better options for many users regardless of their priorities; this is more of a last-minute cart toss to add a bit of fast storage. We would love to give it a higher score, but similar drives have been as low as $85 at 1TB, making this a hard sell for those who can wait.

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The Sabrent Docking Station comes in a variety of capacities ranging from 2TB to 16TB and comes packing copious connectivity options, including dual 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 3 ports with power delivery and a 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Type-C port, among many options.

Internally this device holds dual Sabrent Rocket Q NVMe SSDs, between 1TB and 8TB each. Since these are Sabrent Rocket Q SSDs, they each have the expected Phison E12S SSD controller with DDR3L DRAM cache paired with 96-layer Intel/Micron QLC flash, making for a potent combo that can deliver up to 1,500 MBps of throughput (and a theoretical 3,000 MBps in RAID 0).

The price per gigabyte ranges from $0.16 to $0.25 depending on the capacity, with the highest amounts coming for the 2TB SKU followed by the 16TB SKU. This makes sense as there is a static cost for the dock hardware, even at 2TB, while the 8TB drives in the 16TB model are more expensive given their high capacity. 

Specifications

Features include:

• 2x Thunderbolt 3 ports, up to 40 Gbps
• 2x USB 3.2 Type-A ports, up to 10 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2x1)
• 1x USB 3.2 Type-C port, up to 10 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2x1)
• 1x USB 3.0 Type-A port, up to 5 Gbps with BC1.2 5V@2.4A charging (USB 3.2 Gen 1x1)
• 1x DisplayPort 1.4
• 1x Gigabit Ethernet RJ45, 1x 3.5mm audio input, 1x 3.5mm microphone input
• 1x SD (UHS-II) card reader, up to 270 MB/s
• PD3.0-capability, up to 96W

The dock is rated up to 1,500 MBps for sequential reads and writes, but it can hit around twice that if the drives are placed in a striped software RAID-0 configuration. The latter performance metrics are not officially listed but reflect the nature of each drive being allocated two PCIe 3.0 lanes out of a total of four. This is thanks to the Intel JHL7440 controller that also supplies two Thunderbolt 3 (TB3) ports, rated up to 40 Gbps, and a single DisplayPort 1.4 output. One of these TB3 ports can provide power, and the other can daisy-chain devices.

The dock additionally has three USB 3.2 Type-A ports, one rated for up to 10 Gbps and two for up to 5 Gbps, and a single USB 3.2 Type-C port at up to 10 Gbps. USB terminology can be complicated, so we will outline these more precisely below. Additionally, there’s a gigabit ethernet RJ45 port, two 3.5mm ports for audio and microphone input, respectively, and a single UHS-II SD card reader rated for up to 270 MB/s. The dock can also provide power delivery of up to 96W via PD3.0.

The dock comes with a three-year warranty and an endurance rating (TBW - Terabytes Written) equal to one of the two drives. For example, as reviewed, the 16TB dock is warrantied to absorb 1.8 petabytes of write data, as would be the case with just one of its two internal 8TB Sabrent Rocket Q SSDs.

Software and Accessories

The Sabrent Rocket Dock comes with a 150W power adapter, including a detachable power cable and a single 27” ThunderBolt 3 cable. No software is included, but, as usual, we point to the myriad of free solutions available. For RAID, it’s possible to use Windows to build a software array either through Disk Management or Storage Spaces. Similar options exist with other operating systems, such as Disk Utility on OS X.

A Closer Look

Although we have already covered the available ports above, we can see that Sabrent has clearly labeled their ports for the ease of the user. We can, for example, determine which TB3 port provides power.

It’s worth pointing out again that the USB specification has been confusing for a while now - Sabrent labels all the ports as USB 3.2, indicating Gen1 or Gen2 and the speed. The USB 3.2 Gen1 ports are Gen 1x1, equivalent to USB 3.1 Gen 1 or USB 3.0, while the USB 3.2 Gen2 ports are Gen 2x1, the same as USB 3.1 Gen 2 or USB 3.1. The former is rated at 5 Gbps with 8b/10b encoding for an actual output of around 450 MBps, while the latter are 10 Gbps with 128b/132b encoding for closer to 1000 MBps.

The dock opens easily to reveal two separate boards, connected via PCIe slots in a folded manner to reduce volume, and a heatsink for the NVMe drives and structural support. There is also thermal padding and additional component protection.

Removing the heatsink shows that there is good contact with the SSD controllers and sufficient contact for the DRAM, although perhaps not sufficiently tight flash package engagement. Typically the controller on the SSD runs the hottest with regard to thermal influence - that is, the controller is the most significant contributor to throttling. We would not expect throttling to be an issue with this sort of contact, especially given that speeds will be limited by the interface.

A closer look at the main components gives us some idea about how the dock comes together. First, we have Intel’s JHL7440 Thunderbolt controller, a.k.a. Titan Ridge, which supplies the most significant features of the dock, including bandwidth and connectivity for the two internal SSDs.

The Thunderbolt 3 and DisplayPort video outputs support 4K displays at up to 60 Hz or 8K up to 30 Hz, with HDR, HDCP 2.2, and Adaptive Sync compatibility. TB3 also supports other devices, including four PCIe 3.0 lanes utilized by the internal SSDs. Daisy-chaining of up to six devices is supported, as is power delivery up to 96W or 15W for bus-powered devices. Thunderbolt is provided at either 20 or 40 Gbps and is bidirectional with connection support up to 10 Gbps for USB or ethernet.

The USB ports are provided by two 2-/4-port USB hub chips manufactured by VIA Labs, or VLI, with the USB 3.1 Gen 1 (USB 3.2 Gen 1x1) VL817 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 (USB 3.2 Gen 2x1) VL820-Q8. In addition, these controllers support battery charging specification 1.2 (BC1.2), which would output up to 2.4A at 5V but can scale depending on device support.

Realtek’s RTS5329 SD4.0 controller provides the SD slot. In addition, the CMedia CM6533 is utilized for the two audio ports. Lastly, the Realtek ERL8153b is the gigabit ethernet controller.

Here we have the two Sabrent-branded NVMe drives. These appear to be standard 8TB Sabrent Rocket Qs with Sabrent-branded Phison E12S controllers, Kingston DDR3L - in 512M x 16b or 1GB modules - and 8TB of 96-layer flash provided by Intel/Micron. These are solid options if your goal is to maximize the amount of storage in a small amount of space, for example with a NUC or inside a dock. 16TB of total space is a substantial amount given the small footprint. There’s also always the option for RAID, for example, software RAID-0 to double the capacity and performance. RAID-1 or a mirror is also a compelling option for redundancy.

It’s worth mentioning that RAID-0 is technically prone to higher failure rates as an issue with either drive in the array will cause a loss of data due to striping. Likewise, RAID-1 should not be relied upon to secure your data as it is a form of redundancy and not a backup solution.

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Comparison Products

We will be testing the docking station’s internal drives both in single-drive mode and in RAID-0. The competition includes other portable SSDs: the 1TB Samsung X5, the 1TB Kingston XS2000, the 2TB Adata SE900G, the 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro v2, the 1TB LaCie Rugged SSD Pro, and the 1TB WD Black P50. Some of these drives are DRAM-less and it’s worth noting that the host memory buffer (HMB) function is not passed by USB bridge chips. It does work over Thunderbolt, but our docking station drives each has its own local DRAM.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

The docking station SSDs come in last here because QLC flash can have higher latency than TLC flash. The drives are all close together, though, and all are slower than a native drive. In addition, there are no substantial gains from RAID-0 as game loading focuses on low queue depth and low-threaded random reads. This may change in the future with DirectStorage, which is officially on the way as Microsoft recently launched the API.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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 Sabrent dock does well here in both bandwidth and latency, thanks to the TB3 connection. The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro, which also relies on TB3, does equally well. Utilizing RAID-0 helps eke out a bit more bandwidth. A USB connection typically has less bandwidth available as well as more overhead.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. First, we copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder, and then follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

Due to PCIe lane limitations, the dock has less bandwidth available in single-drive mode. In RAID-0, this limitation disappears, and the dock comes out on top in all tests. Notably, the Rugged SSD Pro falls behind with writes and copies compared to the dock’s RAID-0 configuration as it is limited to a single drive.

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.

Again, the dock lags behind in single-drive mode but wins in RAID-0 for our sequential read/write ATTO tests. This trend continues with CrystalDiskMark, particularly with sequential writes. The dock also does well with latency and random reads and writes, particularly writes, only falling behind in areas where the QLC is a bit of a limitation. The RAID-0 especially helps at high queue depth with high threading, obviously with writes.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.

The Rocket Qs utilize full-drive SLC caching, which is around 2TB of QLC for the 8TB SKUs. This cache is doubled in RAID-0 mode. This makes it particularly difficult to show how the drives perform outside of SLC mode, given that the speed is limited in both modes to about half of what the native drives could achieve. This not only spreads the writes out but also gives the controllers more opportunities to do folding in the background. For realistic workloads, the SLC cache should not be limiting, although keep in mind the cache will become much smaller as the drives are filled.

We see more typical patterns with the other drives, including the great direct-to-TLC speeds we would expect on the Extreme Pro v2. Nevertheless, if we’re looking for maximum burst performance, it’s impossible to beat the dock with RAID-0.

Miscellaneous Testing - Ethernet and SD Card Slot Speed

Also worth noting is that speeds over Ethernet should be at the maximum allowed, that is approximately 112.5 MBps. This will never exceed QLC sequential write speeds even on a single drive. The SD card slot, when tested, peaked just shy of the rated 270 MBps, which is a nice option for content creators on the go.

Temperature

As tested the Dock remained generally cool, around 40C after sustained transfers. This may be warm to the touch but is relatively cool, all things considered. The internal drives reported maximum temperatures around 60C, well below the throttling point. It’s nice not to have to worry about thermals in such a small package, but more care would be necessary from the user in super-hot climates if the dock is used outdoors.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket 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.

Conclusion

This is a bit of a different product from our typical SSD reviews, even if you count portable products. However, it’s a useful product with plenty of storage offered in a small form factor with lots of connectivity. However, docks, while popular, inherently confuse many buyers due to how the interlocking components work. Sabrent has labeled the ports clearly, which helps.

Intel’s JHL7440 controller is now four years old, underlining how old the technology is in this dock. That's not necessarily a bad thing on its own, as it’s mature and a step above Alpine Ridge, but it challenges Sabrent’s pricing decision. Other components could be upgraded or added, such as having 20 Gbps USB ports, the addition of Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi, et cetera. That is not to take anything away from this product, as it checks all the basic boxes and should adequately meet most needs; TB4 and even USB4 support would not add much except more cost for many users. It’s just to say that there’s room to grow in this segment, but there may be some sticker shock as-is.

As another example of a potential change, Sabrent could offer TLC-based drives, although the Thunderbolt 3 and PCIe 3.0 interfaces are real-world limitations on performance. Going for capacity was, and is, a smart move. However, there’s no doubt people will wonder why the 2TB model, for example, is QLC-based. We suspect we will see faster internal drives in the future, but the reality is, the flash in these drives is obsolete, as there is 144-layer QLC from Intel and 176-layer QLC from other manufacturers on the way, along with 176-layer TLC being ramped up.

Overall, we were particularly impressed with the design and layout, which, while simple, ensures a tight and effective package. Cooling was more than adequate. Connectivity, again, is well done, with an eye on simplification for general use. Potential compatibility issues would be universal — for instance, and issues with the JHL7440 building block would be an Intel limitation. This means that products like this have a higher support burden for the manufacturer, but from the end user’s standpoint, this particular product would have similar limitations to what you would see from other competing devices with the same hardware. 

If you’re looking for robust connectivity and storage in a portable package, given that Sabrent stands behind their products which include the SSDs, this is the ticket. It’s also possible to RAID the internal storage, which, while largely unnecessary, is a nice option not available with single-drive devices. Also, of course, performance is inherently superior to USB-based portable SSDs. Finally, this is an all-in-one design with portable SSDs and a dock, so it should be treated as such when looking at the price. With that in mind, it’s difficult not to recommend.

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The best wireless gaming headsets provide all the audio quality you get from their wired counterparts without the hassle of being tethered to your PC or getting cables caught under the wheels of your chair. However, most models max out at 30 hours of endurance, which means that you need to remember to charge them regularly.

HyperX's Cloud Alpha Wireless breaks the mold, by combining excellent audio output, strong build quality and a rated 300 hours of battery life. That's ten times what competitors such as the Razer Kraken Pro and HyperX's own Cloud Flight Wireless offer. And indeed, in our use, the headset lasted through more than two weeks of regular use, without even coming close to needing a charge. 

While the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless offers great sound and long battery life, it's not without trade-offs. For the premium price of $199, you don't get RGB lighting, haptic feedback or any other way  to connect except for 2.4 GHz wireless. However, if you don't need these extras, the Cloud Alpha Wireless is hard to beat.

Specifications - HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless

Design and Comfort of HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless

The HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless retains the same design and classic red/black color scheme as the wired Cloud Alpha. The headset utilizes a soft pebblestone leatherette headband with red stitching, threaded wiring, and a red aluminum frame instead of plastic, unlike the budget HyperX Flight Wireless. As such, the headset feels durable and premium at the same time. Thanks to the high-end materials, the Alpha Wireless looks pretty and can survive several falls off a table without a scratch. It does attract dust and fingerprints, but those can easily be wiped off.

The right earcup features an LED light next to the power button to indicate when the device is on. Next to that is a raised mute button, a USB-C port for charging, and a 3.5mm port for the detachable mic. The left earcup has a volume wheel. On either side of the earcups is the HyperX logo, which is not illuminated (if it were, the headset would likely not reach that “300-hour battery life” threshold). The cups can adjust vertically, as they’re held on by a swivel connected to the aluminum frame. The headband can also extend in about 8 increments, measured by the indents inside the frame’s band.

As with many HyperX products, the manufacturer retains its “signature comfort” with memory foam cushions. It felt like my head was in between two clouds. The Alpha Wireless is also surprisingly light at 0.74 pounds (336g), which is only 0.04 pounds heavier than its wired predecessor. It has a slimmer form factor than the wired Cloud Alpha as well. My head didn’t get tired during prolonged use and my ears didn’t get sore either.

Audio Performance of HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless

The HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless supports virtual 7.1 surround sound out of the box, making sounds more immersive on consoles that support the output. When I was playing Persona 5 Royale on PlayStation 4, background noises were so slight that sometimes I thought audio from my smartphone was leaking into my headset. Although the Alpha doesn’t use spatial audio outside of NGenuity, playback with the PlayStation sounds surprisingly good.

In-game music over the PS4 sounds pristine and crisp while maintaining heavy bass and audible kicks. Thanks to the Alpha Wireless’ neodymium dual-chamber drivers and 15Hz - 21,000 kHz frequency response, highs, mids, and lows sound appropriately spaced out and robust. 

I heard “No More What Ifs” for the first time while playing Persona using this headset and it quickly became my favorite song in the game after accumulating 135 hours throughout the years I’ve been playing. It’s such a clean track elevated even more so thanks to the headset’s range of high and mids.

I originally used the Cloud Alpha fresh out of the box, without installing updates from the NGenuity software. Since the quality of sound was great with the PS4, I figured it would sound the same over PC, but I was wrong. Everything sounds flat without any software being used. Music lacked dynamics and the maximum volume didn’t go beyond a satisfactory threshold. Some of the tunes that I created in FL Studio lacked a certain pop I’m used to hearing from my TV speakers, Razer Kraken Pro headset, and my personal Sennheiser MOMENTUM True Wireless 2 earbuds when exported into a .wav file.

I used software release version 2.7.1.0 before it was released to the Microsoft Store. When I connected the Alpha Wireless while using NGenuity, I got a notification with a spelling error, asking if we want “to to level up” our audio experience by downloading new drivers that’ll enable DTSX spatial sound and an EQ. The download also updated the firmware of the Alpha Wireless to v4.1.0.2, which permanently improved the audio threshold. I immediately went back to FL Studio and heard the dynamic sound I was missing before the update, without any of the new features enabled. The maximum volume got louder and the range of sounds was immediately improved. 

The EQ comes with presets mostly geared toward music that boosts or cuts bass and treble. There are also presets for clarity and optimization, as well as one strictly focused on First-Person Shooters. The optimizer preset provides the best balance when listening to music, otherwise, every preset does what it claims to do.

DTSX spatial sound is not great for music, as it instantly muddies the quality with booming bass. Instead, we used DTSX during my playthrough of Devil May Cry V, and it was apparent the setting is best used for gaming. Sounds elevated the game for me during my combat as V. I could hear the bike chain on his belt loops rattle with each step of his hard bottom sandals. 

When I called upon Nico to upgrade my move pool, her exaggerated entrance saw her crashing the van at my location. The sounds of gravel moving as she approached, as well as the ensuing crash landing she made, had a cinematic quality akin to an action film. This appreciation of sounds carried over in combat when I was able to discern an oncoming enemy from its scythe scraping the concrete as it approached. This is all possible due to the spatial audio feature. Although it's not a great feature for standalone music, the music quality wasn’t muddy like it was during regular music playback. Although, sometimes the bass got a little louder than normal when songs bombastically conclude after fights, as they do in DMCV.

If a long-lasting battery is your priority, then the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless is peerless. I tested the headset for more than two weeks and barely depleted half the battery. However, I found the battery drained a bit faster after the software and firmware were installed. Despite this, the Alpha Wireless powers off after a few minutes of nonuse. I believe this is one reason HyperX’s headset can live for so long without charging. I appreciate the large capacity battery, as well as the conscious steps made in order to preserve life.

Compatibility of HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless

The HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless utilizes a 2.4 GHz USB Type-A dongle that’s compatible with PlayStation consoles, PC, and a docked Nintendo Switch. About half the size of the Flight Wireless’ dongle, the Alis good. It’s see-through and has a LED light that shines red when active. 

I attempted to use the 3.5mm headphone jack used to plug in the detachable microphone on the PS4 controller, the undocked Nintendo Switch, and my Xbox One X controller to see if playback was possible, but it wasn’t. There also isn’t a way to connect wirelessly over Bluetooth. This isn’t a big deal, but for a premium $200 headset, it would be nice.

I found compatibility to be limiting without a 3.5mm headphone jack. It’s a bit of an old-school way to connect, but it’s surefire. With it, there’s no need to wonder if the headset is compatible with the dongle. As a result, the Alpha Wireless is best suited for PC use, especially given the software features.

Microphone on HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless

I was surprised by the great quality of the poseable, detachable microphone. My voice came through crystal clear when I heard the playback of myself on the Audacity app. Although there was slight feedback whenever I spoke, it was hardly noticeable in the background. There wasn't as much feedback as we experienced when we used the microphone that comes with the HyperX Cloud Flight Wireless. The bi-directional microphone was even strong enough to pick up the snapping of my fingers a ways away from the receiver. 

Though the microphone is better suited for gaming chats, it can be useful for a quick conference call or a game stream if you’ve got nothing else. But naturally, the quality of this detachable microphone is nowhere near as good as one of the best gaming microphones.

HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless vs the Competition

 For $200, folks may want more connectivity options and other bells and whistles not included with the Cloud Alpha Wireless. For instance, Razer’s Kraken Pro can be used via its proprietary dongle and headphone jack (wire included), features built-in haptic feedback and has RGB lighting that can be turned on or off. 

The Kraken Pro has comparable sound quality when gaming but handles music better than the Cloud Alpha Wireless, all for the same price. However, the Kraken’s battery life will be regulated to the industry standard of about 30 hours. There’s a trade-off with either option, but ultimately, the best choice depends entirely on if you prioritize battery life over contemporary frills.

Bottom Line

The HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless retains the tough build, design, and comfort of the Cloud Flight, but in a slimmer form factor and with a massive 300-hour battery life. Its neodymium dual-chamber drivers, as well as its additional NGenuity EQ and DTSX software make it a great gaming headset in terms of performance too.

However, because there's no Bluetooth or 3.5mm wired options, compatibility is limited. Don't expect to use the Cloud Alpha Wireless with your phone or tablet, not that you'd want to wear such a massive headset as you walk around town or exercise. 

If endurance isn't as important to you, consider the Razer Kraken Pro, which costs the same price but has more connectivity options, as well as built-in haptic feedback, and RGB. Plus, the Kraken Pro sounds better in some instances, like when playing music. 

But if you need a wireless headset that can survive for the long haul, the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless can't be beaten. During my time reviewing the product, the headset never died and, after two weeks, had just gotten down to about 50% capacity. That makes it much less likely you'll have your gaming experience interrupted by a low-battery warning or the loss of audio.

Silicon Power’s XS70, also known as the XPower XS70, is rated up to 7.3 GBps of bandwidth, which is effectively the limit of consumer PCIe 4.0 SSDs. This drive is capable of up to 1 million IOPS, which matches expectations, and comes with a five-year warranty. Silicon Power markets the XS70 as a gaming drive, with specific attention given to the attractive aluminum heatsink. 

Silicon Power is another third-party SSD manufacturer that also makes other products, predominantly flash-based drives that vie for a spot on our list of Best SSDs. The company's most popular SSDs are and were the P34A60 for budget or entry-level, and the perennial mainstream P34A80. The latter was one of the first SSDs based on the Phison E12 controller and it maintained the original hardware layout for a significant period of time. Eventually, it transitioned to using the Phison E12S or Silicon Motion’s SM2262EN controller. Such swaps are common in the industry, but this made the drive less desirable.

Still, the availability and reasonable pricing of the P34A80 put Silicon Power on the map. The company continues to produce mostly Phison-controlled drives, like the UD70 and US70, but the XS70 is certainly the premium part of their product stack.

Silicon Power positions it as a PlayStation 5 (PS5) option as we have seen from competing products, like the Kingston Fury Renegade and Inland Gaming Performance Plus, and it has the newest flash and an attractive PS5-compliant heatsink. The option of a 4TB capacity is nice, particularly because the Gaming Performance Plus doesn't come with this spacious option.

Let’s see if the XS70 measures up.

Specifications

The XS70 is rated for sequential speeds of up to 7.3/6.85 Gbps read/write and 1 million random read and write IOPS, matching competing drives. The drive comes in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. Pricing varies from $0.12-0.19 per gigabyte with the upper limit approached only with the 4TB SKU; this premium is typical, particularly with TLC. The pricing is quite competitive. if you search Silicon Power's spec sheets hard enough, you'll find that the endurance is rated for up to 700 TB of write data per TB of capacity (with the exception of 3PBW at 4TB).

As with all SSDs, there is an “up to” qualifier for performance metrics. It’s worth noting that sequential reads are taken from the native flash, in this case 3-bit MLC or TLC, while sequential writes come from the SLC write cache. Speeds are limited by the amount of interleaving, that is the amount of flash (NAND) dies available for parallelization, such that sequential writes, for example, should be lower at 1TB. Likewise these metrics may rely on a certain queue depth or level of threading, often at unrealistic values.

Therefore, the wise consumer should pay attention to overall hardware and design, which includes the mutability of hardware. That is to say, be aware that results are often under ideal circumstances that will vary in actual usage and, further, manufacturers may modify the hardware down the road.

SP also informed us that the XS70 does not support TCG Opal. Self-encrypting drives (SED) can utilize AES-256 encryption to protect the contents through hardware. This includes an option for a cryptographic erase which throws away the key, being a faster option for a sanitize. Data can also be scrambled after this process.

While we do try to check for this support on drives, it’s worth noting that this feature, while optional for most controllers, is often not present on consumer drives. This can be for product segmentation but also because software encryption is often a preferred approach. For example, Microsoft removed SED support for Bitlocker back in late 2018 because poor firmware implementation allowed malicious decryption. This did require physical access. Worth noting here is that modern drives often have encryption in-flash as well, so attackers cannot access data by removing the physical NAND chips.

Software and Accessories

SP’s XS70 arrives in minimal packaging with no additional accessories. Software support is also nonexistent. This is not a huge deal for experienced users as they can rely on free software, for example CrystalDiskInfo (CDI) or Macrium Reflect Free. Also, gaming drives like this may end up in a console, so the lack of software may not be super important. Modern drives tend not to be reliant on firmware updates, although it is nice to have a SSD toolbox.

A Closer Look

The XS70 utilizes the common M.2 2280 form factor, with an attractive, aluminum heatsink in black and silver. One complaint some enthusiasts have is that heatsinks are often more about looks than performance, meaning the design is not conducive to airflow. While many SSDs do not require a heatsink in the first place, high-end PCIe 4.0 drives can start to run quite warm, especially in poorly-ventilated environments or inside a console. This one gets the job done despite itself. SP claims it’s up to 40% cooler, but our testing has it running hotter than the Inland Gaming Performance Plus. The thermal padding also did not have quite as good contact.

Under the cover we see the traditional layout of four NAND packages, the controller, and DRAM cache, with the flash and DRAM likely mirrored on the back side.

Phison’s E18 controller has appeared many times on our testbench. It’s a popular, if not the most popular, choice for high-end PCIe 4.0 drives. Phison took the consumer SSD market by storm with its E12 controller, and while we feel the E16 was a nice stop-gap solution — which has actually remained of at least niche use with the PS5 — the E18 really begins to push the envelope.

DRAM consists of SK hynix DDR4 in the 512M x 16b configuration, for a total of 2GB with two 1GB modules. We have seen older E12-based drives come with either DDR3 or DDR4, and many drives also had DDR3L or DDR4L as options. Effectively the difference here is in power consumption, keeping in mind that DRAM cache on a SSD is utilized for metadata storage and access. This means the latency advantage is most important, and “true latency” is a factor of both bandwidth, through clock speed, and native latency, the latter of which usually increases generationally. DRAM ICs also tend to support a range of speeds and latencies.

The flash is Micron’s 176-layer B47R TLC NAND which is being produced in good volume at this point. We will see competitor flash of this generation soon, even as flash manufacturers are already looking ahead. The QLC options in particular should be interesting. Regardless, Micron’s B47R remains the best consumer option on the market and it pairs excellently with Phison’s E18 controller. We have seen that in past reviews as it’s been compared to very similar drives utilizing Micron’s 96-layer B27B instead.

As with the Inland Gaming Performance Plus the flash is running at 1200 MT/s. This is not a hard limitation on the controller as Phison lists up to 1600 MT/s per channel on their data sheet for the E18. As flash tends to operate in an 8-bit mode this translates to 1600 MBps per channel maximum, given sufficient flash, although there’s significant overhead due to other bus data such as commands and addresses. This is especially true for write operations which require acknowledgement. In any case, it’s plenty of bandwidth to saturate four lanes of PCIe 4.0.

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Comparison Products

We compare the XS70 to the top PCIe 4.0 drives, including those with the same hardware. The Kingston KC3000, Seagate FireCuda 530, and Corsair MP600 Pro XT all have Phison’s E18 SSD controller paired with Micron’s 176-layer TLC. The other usual suspects are Western Digital’s (WD’s) Black SN850, the Crucial P5 Plus, and the Samsung 980 Pro. Lastly we have the recently-added Inland Gaming Performance Plus that's a direct “gaming” competitor in this space. It has the same hardware with a similar focus on PS5 compatibility and a cooling heatsink. These drives are all 2TB. 

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.

A gaming drive should do well on this benchmark, and the XS70 does. This is as expected since other E18-based drives, especially those with 176-layer flash, have dominated here. Loading times still rely heavily on latency, so it’s nice to see good performance there. Bandwidth might become more important on the PC in the future due to DirectStorage, but the E18 has it covered.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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.

PCMark 10 presents itself as a more “real world” benchmark and it is at least useful for illustrating optimization differences. It’s one place we see the P5 Plus and Black SN850 pull away from the Phison-controlled drives, for example. In any case, the XS70 almost precisely matches the Inland Gaming Performance Plus, as we would expect.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The E18 controller is known for strong sequential performance and we see that here. This is a somewhat realistic burst test, but check the sustained write results to get a better picture for larger transfers. The XS70 throws us no surprises 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.

The XS70 shows strong performance with sequential workloads at queue depth 1 within the ATTO test suite, particularly at higher I/O block sizes. This matches expectations from other E18-based drives, regardless of the flash used.

The XS70 also precisely matches E18-based drives with 176-layer flash in the CrystalDiskMark (CDM) tests, although this is one area where WD’s Black SN850 stands out a bit. CDM is a very popular tool for reviewers and enthusiasts as it can give a quick look at performance to see if there’s anything wrong with a new drive, if nothing else.

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 (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.

The XS70’s SLC caching scheme is reminiscent of the more conservative ones seen in drives like the FireCuda 530, the MP600 Pro XT, and the Inland Gaming Performance Plus. This includes a fast SLC mode, writing at around 6.9 GBps for up to 32 seconds, indicating a cache size of roughly 220GB. This is about one-third of the drive’s native flash being capable of SLC mode, given an empty drive, as opposed to the full-drive SLC caching found in products like the KC3000.

The second performance phase, typically direct-to-TLC, is slower but still much faster than drives with older flash and/or larger caches. Micron’s 176-layer TLC is quite fast in native mode, hitting speeds that would exceed typical PCIe 3.0 limits for consumer drives. This continues on for some time and is also where the drive goes back to when allowed to idle for some time. That is, recovery is not particularly swift, but the drive remains relatively responsive compared to many others.

The final performance state, which is easier to hit when the drive is fuller because there are fewer free blocks and the SLC cache is much smaller, is a bit less than half the native write speed. Cache that shrinks with drive usage is known as dynamic, although it’s also possible to use static or dedicated SLC — which notably is not actual, native SLC — or a hybrid structure as with Samsung’s TurboWrite. It’s worth noting that, due to how flash operates, NAND already performs worse when the drive is fuller, so SLC caching can exacerbate the situation if the cache is exhausted.

The slower state is bottlenecked by 'folding,' which is the copyback mechanism of data from SLC to TLC blocks, with freed SLC blocks converting to TLC. Flash tends to be cycled into SLC mode based on effective wear. This can introduce additive wear or write amplification since data is rewritten. This is related to over-provisioned space, also, because dynamic SLC shares its garbage collection zone with native flash, so erased SLC blocks eventually operate as TLC. In any case, this state is slower because incoming data is first written to SLC, then read from SLC, then finally written to TLC. One reason it’s important to respect this performance state is that latency is increased particularly for incoming information as it must be transferred before being read.

Technical details aside, a more conservative SLC caching scheme — as on the XS70 versus the KC3000 — ensures more consistent performance, particularly in edge cases as with sustained writes on a fuller drive. Steady state or equilibrium performance is also better. This is ideal for a premium drive that’s used for more serious workloads. Of course most consumers, and certainly those focused on gaming, don’t need to be concerned with this. Strong burst performance offered by a large enough SLC cache is usually sufficient.

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 storage.

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 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.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Remember that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

Power consumption, efficiency, and thermals are only becoming more important in the consumer SSD space. Power draw is increasing in gaming machines and we have PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the horizon. One advantage of newer flash, which includes putting peripheral circuitry under the array but also increasing layer count and die density, is that power efficiency is going up. Controllers still run hotter under peak performance (for example, with longer SLC writes), so SSDs are more often coming with robust cooling solutions. Gaming drives like the XS70 are no different; the drive comes with a thick heatsink, but remains able to fit in the PS5.

The XS70 pulled about as much power as other similarly-equipped drives but still taking more average power than the 980 Pro and Black SN850. This certainly comes from the emphasis on performance in sequential work with the E18 controller, and the large-cached KC3000 is notably the least efficient. The XS70’s considerable heatsink is more stylized than it is effective. That is to say, the drive ran notably hotter than the more functional design on the Gaming Performance Plus. We saw temperatures as high as 73C, although throttling was not an issue.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket 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.

Conclusion

Silicon Power’s XS70 finds itself in an increasingly competitive space. We’ve recently reviewed two direct competitors in the Kingston Fury Renegade and the Inland Gaming Performance Plus, but aside from the “gaming”-oriented marketing there are simply a ton of high-performing PCIe 4.0 drives on the market. Gaming at the moment, whether on PC or console, does not benefit much from this extreme level of bandwidth. This may change in the future, particularly when DirectStorage arrives, but there is a limit to how much of a premium you should pay for a small advantage.

Likewise, putting a fancy heatsink on the drive — even if it is PS5-compatible — doesn't make an SSD a gaming drive. It certainly can help with throttling in difficult environments, although a well-ventilated case with a workload that has a minimum sustained writes should have no issues, even with a bare drive. This is especially true with the more efficient 176-layer flash we see on this drive. That said, the drive is attractive and a heatsink does offer some cooling even if it’s mostly for looks, although perhaps form should not be prioritized over function. The real question is: how much value does it add when considering the price?

Luckily, the XS70, as priced during the writing of this review, is affordable relative to the other options. Considering it has high-end hardware and a 4TB option, this is no small favor. Silicon Power of course had this advantage also with the P34A80, so it’s nice to see the company returning to that approach. One can only hope they don’t decide to switch the hardware later as they did on that drive. As is, it’s equally capable as any competitor and only lacking in the software department. To be fair, that's not critical for PS5 usage in any case.

The SLC cache design is also more conservative (the cache is smaller), allowing for higher post-SLC performance. This is not usually relevant for gaming usage, although it can be nice to have in some cases with a fuller drive and extreme updates. That being said, it enables the drive to be used for much heavier workloads if the need ever arises. Considering that higher-capacity drives are on the way and a user might prefer that for a gaming drive, this does add some long-term versatility.

On the whole, there’s little not to like about this drive, and we rather like the design and pricing. It doesn’t offer anything special over other drives that use the same hardware, but that’s not a bad thing. We can easily recommend this drive as a premium option for any user, particularly at 2TB.

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The A440 Pro and A440 Pro Special Series SSDs offer up to 7.4 Gbps of bandwidth with a peak of 1 million IOPS over the PCIe 4.0 interface, and the five-year warranty even supports up to 3 petabytes of write data for the 4TB model. Team Group clearly intends these to be premium drives, with the 2TB named the "A440 Pro" while the 4TB model is branded as the " A440 Pro Special Series" drive.

Team Group likes to put out a wide range of models, which can be a bit overwhelming and confusing for the average consumer. This is at least partially done by design because the hardware often changes in this industry; it seems like almost every day there’s a controller or flash swap on some drive or another. A common complaint is that a drive might be reviewed and, sometime later, be modified in such a way that performance has been diminished. We’ve certainly seen this with ADATA’s SX8200 Pro, for example. Having a blanket of different models also ensures your products will fill every niche or, at least, end up on everyone’s comparison list.

Team positions the A440 Pro Special Series specifically for the Playstation 5 (PS5), and at 4TB, it provides plenty of capacity for a plethora of games to be installed. In addition, the graphene heatspreader was designed with only 3.7mm of height, well below the PS5’s 8mm requirement, so it can fit into pretty much any machine. The material is also flexible with high conductivity to ensure a good balance between compatibility and cooling. This makes it ideal for tight environments, especially with the PS5, which should not have heavy enough write workloads to push the thermal envelope.

This separates it from the original A440 Pro which, while sharing the same hardware as the A440 Pro Special Series in retail, relies on a more traditional and much larger heatsink. This aluminum heatsink has a design that all but ensures the drive will never throttle during heavy read and write operations. Typically, thermal throttling is not an issue for E18 drives in well-ventilated environments, and often the worst environments are space-restricted. However, those who run their systems hotter or want a more conspicuous design can go with the heatsinked A440 Pro. During the writing of this review Team also released a version of the A440 Pro with a graphene heatspreader, blurring the lines between models; we reiterate our complaint that Team has too many SKUs.

Regardless, Team has become a major contender in this space in recent years. Their RGB SATA drives are popular, and the Vulcan SATA drives are too, for that matter. However, there's no denying that a slew of M.2 NVMe drives have come out of Team using a wide range of hardware: Phison and SMI controllers, DRAM and DRAM-less options, TLC and QLC, using anywhere from 64- to 176-layered flash. Oh, and of course, their high-endurance “Chia” T-Create Expert. This is not new for a third-party SSD manufacturer, and they also often label their own flash on some models, just like ADATA and Kingston. This means that a consumer looking for a drive is bound to come across a Team Group SSD as an option.

Specifications

The A440 Pro series of drives are rated for sequential speeds of up to 7.4/7.0 GBps read/write, down to 7.2/6.0 GBps respectively for the 1TB SKUs due to less interleaving, but they peak at 1 million read and write IOPS for all capacities. These capacities range from 1TB-3TB, with current pricing between $0.17 and $0.22 per gigabyte.

This is premium pricing, and the 4TB Special Series model is particularly expensive compared to the 1TB and 2TB options, although the 4TB price is a bit lower at the time of writing than it has been recently. 

The five-year warranty supports 700 TB of data-writes-per-TB for the 1 and 2TB models and 3PBW for the 4TB model.

Software and Accessories

The A440 Pro, which we're testing at 2TB, comes with a double-sided aluminum heatsink that includes an appropriate thermal pad. Good contact with a thermal pad can help lower temperatures significantly because if the heatsink has enough surface area, the thermal bottleneck tends to be at the interface (assuming a sufficiently-cooled environment).

The A440 Pro Special Series, which we are testing at 4TB, instead comes with a graphene heat spreader, which is bound to be less effective but also less intimidating in physical size.

A Closer Look

The A440 Pro and A440 Pro Special Series come in the common M.2 2280 form factor, double-sided at the tested capacities. The A440 Pro’s heatsink is likely more than what is necessary, while the more subdued heat spreader on the A440 Pro Special Series is minimalistic in design. Both drives contain back labels that offer more information about the specific drive. Beneath the cooling and labels, we see that both drives utilize Phison’s E18 controller and have two DRAM modules with eight NAND packages, half of each respectively on either side.

Phison’s E18 controller remains one of the best PCIe 4.0 options available and is used in a slew of drives. To reach these higher capacities, the drives have eight 256GB and 512GB NAND packages for the 2TB and 4TB models, respectively. It’s possible to get by with fewer packages, whether by stacking more dies in a package or using denser flash, but most PCs have no trouble handling double-sided drives these days.

The drives have two DRAM packages from Hynix, labeled H5AN8G6CJRVKC, which are 1GB of DDR4 a piece. DRAM overclockers will recognize the CJR as C-die, but keep in mind that DRAM usage on an SSD tends to be more about low latency and power consumption rather than raw bandwidth.

Both drives use Micron’s newer 176-layer TLC which is often coupled with Phison’s E18 on high-end SSDs. There are plenty of dies for interleaving at these capacities. Worth noting here is that the original 2TB A440 Pro we received for testing actually had what is termed as 'media-grade' flash, which is sufficient for mainstream SSDs but can have slight performance ramifications. Our second sample had a higher quality flash, but we used our test results from the 2TB SSD with lower-binned flash for this review. Our 4TB model, also part of this review, shipped with higher-end flash. 

Flash tends to be graded, or binned, based on effective yields and the amount of valid blocks. NAND manufacturers will use different grades of flash for different applications - for example, we’ve seen Micron’s top-tier FortisMax flash on Team’s T-Create Expert Chia drive that touts the utmost in endurance and performance in brutal write-heavy workloads. Lower-grade (media grade, in Micron parlance) flash can also find its way into your more garden-variety SSDs, but they can deliver enough endurance to meet the warrantied specs by using strong LDPC ECC and other wear mitigation techniques.

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Comparison Products

We tested the 2TB Team A440 Pro against other E18 drives with 176-layer flash, including the Kingston KC3000, Seagate’s FireCuda 530, and the Corsair MP600 Pro XT, as well as other top PCIe 4.0 contenders. These include the WD Black SN850, Samsung’s 980 Pro, and Crucial’s P5 Plus, as well as the original A440 model, all at 2TB. 

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.

The 2TB A440 Pro is in the middle of the pack here, albeit notably faster than its 96-layer sibling. However, its numbers are up to 10% lower than comparable drives from other manufacturers.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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 2TB A440 Pro is trending towards the bottom of the list here, only beating out the older A440. It is 10% or more behind the KC3000, FireCuda 530, and MP600 XT Pro.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

Differences are less pronounced here as we’re dealing essentially with sequential performance on a file read/copy. It is nevertheless instructive as many users may buy a PCIe 4.0 drive simply for burst performance.

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.

The 2TB A440 Pro matches other E18-based drives in ATTO, generally out-performing competing PCIe 4.0 controllers. However, we do see it lag behind other E18 drives with 176-layer flash in some CrystalDiskMark results.

Specifically, we’re seeing a hit on some read metrics, which is not surprising given that this drive uses the lower-tier flash. The A440 Pro is still quite fast, just not up to the level we expect from the typical controller and flash pairing.

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 (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.

The 2TB A440 Pro writes at a maximum speed of around 6.9 GBps for a bit over 30 seconds, offering a considerably-sized SLC cache but far less than the full-drive SLC caching we see on the WD Black SN850 and Kingston KC3000. It’s closer in size to the Crucial P5 Plus and Samsung 980 PRO. This dynamic cache will shrink as the drive is filled, but the overall cache capacity should be sufficient for general usage.

After the SLC cache is exhausted, we see a direct-to-TLC mode that’s actually quite fast, although it does not reach what the flash is capable of - we see that instead with the Seagate FireCuda 530 and Corsair MP600 Pro XT. It is nevertheless quite fast, demonstrating a different design than we see on Kingston’s KC3000, with a faster post-SLC response. The drive still inevitably hit a slower folding state, but this would require quite a bit of sustained writing.

We get good results from this intermediate scheme but perhaps not as high as we could, potentially as a secondary effect of the flash quality. Writing more slowly can improve endurance indirectly, but keeping in mind that the TLC programming sequence involves verifying the data between steps, the error rate will increase when writing in a native mode beyond what we see in single-bit SLC mode. Additionally, flash can be run at a lower I/O speed or MT/s to reduce the error rate, indirectly impacting latency. When looking at the 4TB A440 Pro Special Series sustained write results, it's worth keeping this in mind. However, keep in mind that the error correction mechanisms still ensure that the data is stored correctly — it can just have an impact on performance

Cache recovery after idling was not significant; in general, TLC-like speeds continued even after idle time. 

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 storage.

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 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.

We also monitor the drive’s temperature via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Remember that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

When looking at power consumption and efficiency, the 2TB A440 Pro is again in the middle of the pack. However, efficiency is lower than what is seen with other E18 drives using 176-layer TLC flash, which could indicate more controller overhead.

SSD controllers are application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) with multiple functional blocks, for example having an error-correcting code (ECC) module. Older controllers relied on hard BCH decoding which is, in effect, more efficient and less space-consuming on the die than what is required for LDPC decoding, whether hard or soft. LDPC is more effective, though, which enables the mitigation of more errors. Lower-quality flash may be more dependent on ECC to achieve the same levels of performance and endurance in some cases.

The A440 Pro’s heatsink was more than adequate in our testing, and we saw no significant throttling. In fact, maximum temperatures were well below throttling, hitting the mid-50s Celsius at worst. Typical drives are designed to throttle above 70C or so as per composite sensor, although significant throttling is usually not seen until above 80C.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket 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.

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4TB A440 Pro Special Series

Rating: ★★★★ ½ (Editor's Choice) 

Verdict: The 4TB A440 Pro Special Series did not disappoint - this is a premium drive that is particularly good at 4TB.

FOR

+ High overall performance, and as expected
+ 4TB pricing for a drive of this quality is competitive
+ Conservative SLC caching design has faster, more consistent overall performance
+ Runs sufficiently cool and is efficient

AGAINST

- None

Comparison Products

We compared the 4TB Team A440 Pro Special Series to 4TB drives like the Seagate FireCuda 530, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, and WD’s Red SN700, the first two being drives hosting comparable hardware. We’re also testing against popular 2TB PCIe 4.0 drives like the WD Black SN850, Crucial’s P5 Plus, the Samsung 980 Pro, and lastly another E18-based 176-layer entry with the Kingston KC3000.

This field of drives lets us see if the A440 Pro Special Series stands out from a crowd of its peers, keeping in mind that its current price point for the 4TB capacity is quite competitive in the PCIe 4.0 SSD market.

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.

The results of our 3DMark tests are as expected for this drive, notably without any anomalies like we saw with the 2TB A440 Pro. The 4TB A440 Pro Special Series performs in line with the other E18-based drives that use Micron’s 176-layer TLC flash. 

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a 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 drive also matches expectations in PCMark 10, although results are a bit lower than with the direct competition in the 2TB Kingston KC3000. One reason is that there is a peak performance capacity for drives dependent on the controller and flash used. While with past generations, 2TB was not always as fast as 1TB in all benchmarks, we’re slowly moving towards 2TB being the peak sweet spot.

Interleaving tends to be best at around four dies per channel, which with the eight-channel Phison E18 and 64GB dies would be at 2TB. Previous generations of TLC flash were 32GB per die, often with 64GB options that were slower in some metrics, but Micron’s 176-layer B47R flash is natively 64GB. Of course, Micron’s 96-layer B27A and B27B - the latter especially popular with early E18 drives - were 64GB per die, although their lineage was found in the 64-layer, 64GB B17A which was effectively two 32GB B16A dies put together.

The ability to scale flash is one benefit of new, higher-layer generations, although this also means that lower-capacity drives are reliant on multi-planar interleaving as there will be fewer overall dies; these parallelization types are not precisely equal. These technical details are not super relevant to the general user but are worth considering when looking at edge capacities.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.