GIGABYTE Announces AORUS Gen4 SSD Series without Heatsinks

[btarunr]

GIGABYTE was among the first to the market with a PCI-Express gen 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD, with its AORUS NVMe Gen4 SSD series from June 2019. Those drives are characterized by bulky copper heatsinks. The company decided to launch variants of the drive that lack this heatsink, and instead using only a thin copper peel that works both as a heatspreader and as a product label. The rationale behind this product is to let people use the M.2 heatsink that came with their motherboards. The lineup consists of 1 TB (GP-AG41TB) and 2 TB (GP-AG42TB) variants, and introduces a new 500 GB variant (GP-AG4500G) that's not available in the original lineup.

The underlying drive is identical. It combines a Phison PS5016-E16 controller with 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory over 8 channels, and a DDR4 DRAM cache (512 MB for the 500 GB variant, 1 GB for the 1 TB variant, and 2 GB for the 2 TB variant). All three variants offer sequential read speeds of up to 5000 MB/s. The 1 TB and 2 TB variants offer up to 4400 MB/s sequential writes, while the 500 GB variant offers up to 2500 MB/s. The 1 TB and 2 TB variants further offer the same 4K random-access performance numbers of 750k/700k IOPS (reads/writes), while the 500 GB variant offers up to 400k/550k IOPS. GIGABYTE is backing the drives with 5-year product warranties. The company didn't reveal pricing.



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[Lionheart]

Wow that 500GB has incredible cache size lol

 

[Calmmo]

Have they fixed their firmware/drive throttling at 60c yet?

 

[InVasMani]

Wow that 500GB has incredible cache size lol

It ain't about that 640KB it's how you use it.

 

[tiggywombat]

How long will these last if they don't have heatsinks/active cooling? The temperatures must be toasty

 

[Object55]

Tops out at 2TB, I wish more companies would make 4TB drives to bring competition to the market.

The 2TB isn't worth it imo. Out of that you get like 1.8 usable storage + you have to keep like 300 GB unused so it would run at maximum frequency. So you are left with 1.5, meh. Windows, few games and a download folder.

 

[EarthDog]

you have to keep like 300 GB unused so it would run at maximum frequency

300gb of empty space? Seriously? No. Waste of space. You can get away with 10x less without a noticeable difference.

Maybe you all would have more space if you stopped this additional overprovisioning nonsense and keeping an exhorbinant amount of extra free space.

 

[claster17]

How long will these last if they don't have heatsinks/active cooling? The temperatures must be toasty

The NAND might in fact last longer because at higher temperatures electrons can move more freely which in turn puts less wear on the cells. The controller (assuming proper heat management) will only throttle earlier without a heatsink. Although that only happens under sustained writes. Keep in mind that these drives usually can write at 2-4 GB/s. Now think about what kind of workload can even produce such write loads for more than a few seconds. An average user wouldn't notice any difference between with and without heatsink. Heck, most of us can't even tell the difference between SATA and a fast NVMe in day to day use.

 

[QUANTUMPHYSICS]

Assuming there are no supply disruptions, I wonder what SSD prices will be in November ()Black Friday) for 2TB, 4TB and 8TB.