Wednesday, June 19th 2024
Gigabyte Promises 219,000 TBW for New AI TOP 100E SSD
Gigabyte has quietly added a new SSD to its growing lineup and this time around it's something quite different. The drive is part of Gigabyte's new AI TOP (Trillions of Operations per Second) and was announced at Computex with little fanfare. At the show, the company only announced that it would have 150x the TBW compared to regular SSDs and that it was built specifically for AI model training. What that 150x means in reality is that the 2 TB version of the AI TOP 100E SSD will deliver no less than 219,000 TBW (TeraBytes Written), whereas most high-end 2 TB consumer NVMe SSDs end up somewhere around 1,200 TBW. The 1 TB version promises 109,500 TBW and both drives have an MTBF time of 1.6 million hours and a five-year warranty.
Gigabyte didn't reveal the host controller or the exact NAND used, but the drives are said to use 3D NAND flash and both drives have a LPDDR4 DRAM cache of 1 or 2 GB depending on the drive size. However, the pictures of the drive suggest it might be a Phison based reference design. The AI TOP 100E SSDs are standard PCIe 4.0 drives, so the sequential read speed tops out at 7,200 MB/s with the write speed for the 1 TB SKU being up to 6,500 MB/s, with the 2 TB SKU slightly behind at 5,900 MB/s. No other performance figures were provided. The drives are said to draw up to 11 Watts in use, which seems very high for PCIe 4.0 drives. No word on pricing or availability as yet.
Source:
Gigabyte
Gigabyte didn't reveal the host controller or the exact NAND used, but the drives are said to use 3D NAND flash and both drives have a LPDDR4 DRAM cache of 1 or 2 GB depending on the drive size. However, the pictures of the drive suggest it might be a Phison based reference design. The AI TOP 100E SSDs are standard PCIe 4.0 drives, so the sequential read speed tops out at 7,200 MB/s with the write speed for the 1 TB SKU being up to 6,500 MB/s, with the 2 TB SKU slightly behind at 5,900 MB/s. No other performance figures were provided. The drives are said to draw up to 11 Watts in use, which seems very high for PCIe 4.0 drives. No word on pricing or availability as yet.
31 Comments on Gigabyte Promises 219,000 TBW for New AI TOP 100E SSD
That means that the only data being written to your SSD is either coming from Wi-Fi/Ethernet at less than 1/10th the speed it can write at, or it's data being compressed/decompressed by that 15W U-series CPU and unlikely to ever max out the SSD.
It's a perfect example of why not every system needs a bleeding-edge SSD. Most SSDs are fine for most use cases. Unless you are a heavy storage user (ML, Data Analytics, Simulation, 4K/8K video editor) then you can kind of ignore what SSD your computer has, as long as it's still an SSD and not spinning rust. You could put a 12-year-old SATA SSD in a top-of-the-range gaming PC and while you could measure the reduction in performance compared to a high-end SSD, you probably wouldn't care. Things that take 20 seconds with the fancy SSD probably take 25 seconds with the ancient SATA drive but those extra five seconds every now and again aren't going to ruin your day.
People are sort of missing the point of this drive, and Gigabyte's RUBBISH marketing is largely to blame. This is supposed to be used for a large, fast pagefile for AI workloads. This is not for consumer use, and mostly not even for enterprise use.
and it's apperantly a DELL OEM drive too..