Acer Predator GM7 4 TB

[W1zzard]

The Acer Predator GM7 is an incredibly fast SSD, rivaling the performance of top-tier models like the Samsung 990 Pro and WD SN850X. Priced at $270, it offers excellent value for its speed and capabilities. The only concern is global availability, which seems quite limited at this time.

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[Chaitanya]

Looks like a good drive for laptops and even to put in external enclosures.

 

[Wirko]

Looks like a good drive for laptops and even to put in external enclosures.

As an external drive, it can't make use of HMB. Performance in certain areas could suffer a lot, in random writing for example, where all external SSDs are already bad.

@W1zzard, any possibility of running at least some synthetic benchmarks with HMB disabled?

 

[Chrispy_]

So is this effectively just an NM790 with a different brand on the sticker? or is it actually a different drive?

The overall performance is very similar to the NM790 but individual tests have some differences that are greater than the expected margin of measurement variance. That could be down to different NAND capacities having marginally different specs, or it could be firmware differences - I don't know if either Lexar or Acer have tweaked the firmware, or whether that's entirely provided by Maxiotech without modification.

 

[Space Lynx]

@W1zzard I heard someone once say no dram cache can make a boot drive for windows cause reboots, was that pure nonsense, or is there something to that? I use my KC3000 1tb that has dram cache as my boot drive for a long time now, so just curious.

 

[Chrispy_]

@W1zzard I heard someone once say no dram cache can make a boot drive for windows cause reboots, was that pure nonsense, or is there something to that? I use my KC3000 1tb that has dram cache as my boot drive for a long time now, so just curious.

Sounds like pure FUD to me; I've used hundred(s) of DRAMless drives over the years - SN550, SN570, SN770, SN580, NV1, and various OEM drives taken out of new laptops to be replaced with larger M.2 drives - never once have I had systems reboot randomly that couldn't be attributed to another hardware fault (usually CPU or RAM) and I've not personally seen any SSD failures on consumer drives since OCZ Sandforce and Samsung 840 series from the early SATA SSD days. That's a sample size of maybe 600-800 drives.

If there was a widespread issue with DRAMless drives causing reboots it'd be all over the web because they're popular and likely hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people use them as boot drives. If your system RAM is unstable then sure, the HMB area in RAM might get corrupted - but that's not the cause of a reboot, that's a symptom of unstable/faulty RAM and nothing to do with the SSD.

 

[Space Lynx]

Sounds like pure FUD to me; I've used hundred(s) of DRAMless drives over the years - SN550, SN570, SN770, SN580, NV1, and various OEM drives taken out of new laptops to be replaced with larger M.2 drives.

If there was a widespread issue it'd be all over the web. If your system RAM is unstable then sure, the HMB area in might get corrupted - but that's not the cause of a reboot, that's a symptom of unstable/faulty RAM and nothing to do with the SSD.

yep, it wasn't from an official source, so i agree was probably nonsense and amateur pc builder that just had an instability somewhere else.

 

[W1zzard]

So is this effectively just an NM790 with a different brand on the sticker? or is it actually a different drive?

Pretty much, yes. The SLC cache is a bit different though

The overall performance is very similar to the NM790

I think newer firmware and the different SLC cache size

I heard someone once say no dram cache can make a boot drive for windows cause reboots, was that pure nonsense

No way. Tens of millions of DRAM-less drives have been sold and if there was a significant number of reboots, we'd have heard of it by now and people would have RMA'd their drives. Can't even think of a technical reason

 

[_roman_]

The following is off topic. DRAM Less nvme drives can cause issues in certain cases with certain manufacturers.

Windows 11 24H2 is causing headaches, BSODs for some Western Digital SSD owners

Update: WD has released a firmware fix for SSDs affected by Windows 11 24H2 BSODs. Download WD's Dashboard software as instructed here for more.

www.techspot.com

The additional 136MB of cache memory allocation has caused WD's SSDs to behave erratically, forcing the entire operating system into a BSOD loop. Windows 23H2 correctly allocates 64MB of RAM to DRAM-less SSDs, suggesting that the issue was introduced with Microsoft's latest Windows 11 upgrade.
For SSD owners encountering blue screens after upgrading to 24H2, there's no need to panic. A registry-based workaround is available to limit HMB allocation to 64MB or disable it entirely.

 

[anonuser57]

That random read latency is very concerning. For games from the Total War : Warhammer 3 and probably other total war games random read latency matters a lot in load times. It matters to the point that a drive with good random read latency on a pcie2x1 interface can load the game faster than a drive with poor read latency on a pcie3x4 interface.

I'm not sure if that behavior is unique to Total War or not, but if it's not then the game selection used for SSD reviews may need one that displays that sort of behavior.

 

[nageme]

What's the green line in the temperature graphs?

And generally, would be interesting to know the write amplification of drives, and any notable SMART stats during testing, like life remaining, or abnormalities.

Though, if I'm not mistaken, NVMe for some reason tends to be less informative?
(Is there something similar to ATA/ACS Drive Statistics on NVMe?)

 

[W1zzard]

What's the green line in the temperature graphs?

Second temp sensor, sorry I forgot to update the legend

like life remaining

After review that ends up at 99%, 100% very rarely at 98%, i.e not worth mentioning

 

[Pepamami]

@W1zzard I heard someone once say no dram cache can make a boot drive for windows cause reboots, was that pure nonsense, or is there something to that? I use my KC3000 1tb that has dram cache as my boot drive for a long time now, so just curious.

some OS can give HBM of different sizes, and some ssd, with bad firmware/harware may have problems with non-default HMB size.

The following is off topic. DRAM Less nvme drives can cause issues in certain cases with certain manufacturers.

Windows 11 24H2 is causing headaches, BSODs for some Western Digital SSD owners

Update: WD has released a firmware fix for SSDs affected by Windows 11 24H2 BSODs. Download WD's Dashboard software as instructed here for more.

www.techspot.com

it has nothing to do with DRAM less, its just classic "Some ssd drives can cause issues". Since other DRAM less drives don't have these issues.

 

[bug]

@W1zzard You may want to take another look at the heatsink/no heatsink graphs and section titles. Something doesn't add up.

 

[Chrispy_]

The following is off topic. DRAM Less nvme drives can cause issues in certain cases with certain manufacturers.

Windows 11 24H2 is causing headaches, BSODs for some Western Digital SSD owners

Update: WD has released a firmware fix for SSDs affected by Windows 11 24H2 BSODs. Download WD's Dashboard software as instructed here for more.

www.techspot.com

Sounds like a Microsoft problem to me. Their change, their lack of testing, their hurry to push a change to public builds despite enough reports of issues to warrant aborting the rollout.
WD have a firmware update, though as far as I can tell it's 100% not their fault and they're just locking down their drives to 64MB as a workaround until Microsoft get their shit together and undo their mistake in incorrectly implementing the HMB standard.

Since replacing traditional internal testing procedures with the Windows Insider program, Microsoft developers have increasingly used PC users as unpaid beta testers for Windows.

If you want to live on the bleeding edge of software releases, you must expect to bleed. That's literally why it's called the bleeding edge.

 

[chrcoluk]

Yes that WD issue is limited to those drives only, not heard of problems from the wider market and is already an official fix.

The issue is related to them using a large HMB size, and older versions of windows were restricting HMB down to 64MB forcefully which hid the problem, whilst 24H2 now honours the higher size. I would say its more on WD than Microsoft for this one. WD are reducing the requested HMB size to fix it.

The issue is a reminder though that modern software release culture is risky for end users, and it enforces my preference to use LTSC builds.

 

[wesley_wu]

Just bought one from JD (in China) for RMB1399 (USD$196), very solid performance and nice price.

 

[_roman_]

I see it differently. The Problem with DRAM Less drives is the lack of cheap DRAM on it and the firmware of the drives. I remember several issues with DRAM less drives which I can not name anymore. I try to avoid stuff which just exists because a negligible amount of money was saved in combination of a bad firmware.
I doubt a single 512 MiB or 1GiB DDR3/4 DRAM is such expensive for e.g. a 4TB drive.

 

[nageme]

@_roman_
4GB LPDDR4 seems more likely, though also 2GB is used sometimes (seemingly also 1GB and 8GB?).
4GB is probably $15-20 in large quantities.

 

[_roman_]

A bit off topic, I'm sorry.

My KC3000 2TB should have dedicated 2GiB DRAM on the m2 drive, not taken from the system RAM. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/kingston-kc3000/

Let's round it up to 256MiB System RAM is beeing used for a DRAM Less NVME SSD. That should be only 1/8th of the memory of my drive. In my point of view, less RAM to work with, means worse performance

256MiB assumed from this article -> https://www.techspot.com/news/105134-windows-11-24h2-causing-headaches-western-digital-ssd.html

Please feel free to correct me.

 

[sLowEnd]

@W1zzard I heard someone once say no dram cache can make a boot drive for windows cause reboots, was that pure nonsense, or is there something to that? I use my KC3000 1tb that has dram cache as my boot drive for a long time now, so just curious.

Consider that most prebuilts come with DRAMless SSDs these days, and that there's no widespread reboot issue with those

 

[W1zzard]

In my point of view, less RAM to work with, means worse performance

What matters MUCH more than size is the algorithms that you use and how smart they are. WD and MaxioTech are a lot better than other vendors, which is why their DRAM-less drives work extremely well

 

[Wirko]

@_roman_
4GB LPDDR4 seems more likely, though also 2GB is used sometimes (seemingly also 1GB and 8GB?).
4GB is probably $15-20 in large quantities.

The amount of DRAM is 1 GiB per terabyte of capacity in almost all Gen 4 SSDs. The exceptions I'm aware of are 8 TB Gen 4 drives such as the SN850X, which strangely have only 2 GiB of DRAM, and Gen 5 drives, many of which are equipped with 2 GiB per terabyte.