Gigabyte has announced an Aorus PCIe v4 SSD that streams data at 5GB/sec, faster than an Optane gumstick drive.
The gumstick card M.2 2280 drive uses 96-layer 3D NAND from Toshiba organised into TLC (3bits/cell) format. The drive has 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities and a PCIe gen 4 x4 lane interface with NVMe v1.3.
Intels latest Optane memory M15 M.2 drive runs at 450,000/220,000 random read-write IOPS and has 2GB/sec and 900MB/sec sequential read/write bandwidth. The Aorus drive blows it away.
Aorus is Gigabyte’s gaming brand and this is a gamer’s workstation drive. The card supports TRIM and SMART, and has a full body copper heat spreader. It requires an external 2GB DDR4 cache.
Gigabyte supplies a five-year warranty but does not reveal the Aorus drive’s endurance. There is no lifetime terabytes written rating.
This is the first PCIe 4 drive we have seen and we are eager to see a data centre drive using PCIe 4.0. But, with PCIe v5.0 systems likely to appear ion a year’s time vendors may skip the 4.0 standard.
