Sunday, September 13th 2020
GIGABYTE Intros 2TB AORUS Gen4 AIC SSD
GIGABYTE today introduced a 2 TB variant of its AORUS Gen4 AIC SSD. This drive is essentially a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 to four M.2 PCIe Gen 4 x4 riser card that comes with four 500 GB AORUS Gen4 M.2 NVMe SSDs pre-installed. Using it requires a platform with PCIe lane segmentation (most modern platforms since 2016 do), and for the OS to support NVMe RAID.
The riser card component of the AORUS Gen4 AIC SSD has basic logic that controls a lateral blower based on drive temperature, and provides basic disk activity LEDs. Inside, a copper monoblock heatsink pulls heat from all four drives. Each of the four internal M.2 NVMe drives features 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory, and Phison E16 controllers. With NVMe RAID striped, the card offers peak performance of up to 15,000 MB/s sequential reads, and up to 9,500 MB/s sequential writes. Random access performance is rated at up to 425,000 IPS 4K random reads, and up to 440,000 IOPS 4K random writes. GIGABYTE is backing the drive with a 5-year warranty. The company didn't reveal pricing.
The riser card component of the AORUS Gen4 AIC SSD has basic logic that controls a lateral blower based on drive temperature, and provides basic disk activity LEDs. Inside, a copper monoblock heatsink pulls heat from all four drives. Each of the four internal M.2 NVMe drives features 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory, and Phison E16 controllers. With NVMe RAID striped, the card offers peak performance of up to 15,000 MB/s sequential reads, and up to 9,500 MB/s sequential writes. Random access performance is rated at up to 425,000 IPS 4K random reads, and up to 440,000 IOPS 4K random writes. GIGABYTE is backing the drive with a 5-year warranty. The company didn't reveal pricing.
20 Comments on GIGABYTE Intros 2TB AORUS Gen4 AIC SSD
As for the price? I'd say between $350 and $450 otherwise it's just overpriced nand with a PCI-Express addon card thrown in and even that price would be pushing it. I've been seeing 1TB NVMe drives pushing below $100 ~summer 2020.
So lets do the math: the average retail price for the drives is ~$100 x 4 = 400 +/-, then add in somefor the card, controllers, switches, connectors, marketing, packaging etc, and it should run approx $500 at retail...
It will be interesting to see if we get gouged or not :)
But OTOH, this looks suspiciously similar to a ASUS HyperX card (which cost about
$60$85 without any drives)... perhaps they have licensed the design out to other mfgr's ?Adaptor: www.gigabyte.com/it/Solid-State-Drive/AORUS-Gen4-AIC-Adaptor#kf
SSD: www.gigabyte.com/it/Solid-State-Drive/AORUS-NVMe-Gen4-SSD-500GB#kf
They couldn't be more different.
What you meant maybe was the ASROCK one. They're almost identical, except for some power management onboard. Also, the 3.0 ASRock one can easily manage 4.0 speeds on all 4 slots (I tested it, I all of them except the AORUS) while the ASUS one can't because of the vertical arrangement (i.e. the further slots lose integrity with 4.0 speeds).
www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=38_728&item_id=139028&language=en
I have been using the Asus 3.0 card with 4 Intel 660P 1TB that cost me an aggregate cost of $469 in 2018.This drive will probably be somewhere in the range of $549 to $700 US or $749 to $900 Canadian.