In a market that's full of Phison-powered drives, it's always refreshing to see some change. The Acer Predator GM7000 is such a drive. It's powered by the Innogrit IG5236, a modern 8-channel high-end PCI-Express 4.0 controller. Innogrit was founded a few years ago by ex-Marvell staff who decided to engineer their own SSD controller, so these people know what they're doing. Previously, the chips from Innogrit were limited to the low and mid-range segment, but with the IG5236, they are targeting the high-end enthusiast market. The IG5236 supports TLC NAND, DRAM cache, and eight flash channels. The other components on the Acer Predator GM7000 are four 176-layer 3D TLC flash chips made by Micron, and 4 GB of fast Hynix DDR4-3200 DRAM for the mapping tables of the SSD. Compared to the 2 TB version that I reviewed in 2021, the obvious change is that each of the flash chips now has 1 TB capacity instead of 512 GB. Also the flash chips are 176-layer Micron, while some earlier GM7000 1 TB and 2 TB versions shipped with 96-layer flash. Last but not least, the DRAM cache is doubled in size, to go with the bigger capacity, but it's also received a small speed bump, to DDR4-3200, up from DDR4-2666.

Overall synthetic performance results of the GM7000 are very impressive. In all tests we find it near the top of our charts. It seems that Innogrit has optimized their controller for synthetic benchmarks on a mostly empty drive—the way most reviewers test. Phison has been doing this for years, too, so it's just fair. That's why our real-life testing is so important—it runs actual applications and games, which are much harder to optimize for. Our real-life testing is also performed with 80% of the drive filled, which is a more realistic scenario and limits the drive in the way it uses its pseudo-SLC cache.

The real-life performance is excellent, it basically matches or beats what other PCIe 4.0 drives offer. For example, the Phison E18-powered MSI M480 offers the same performance as the GM7000; the Samsung 980 Pro is a tiny bit faster with +1%, just like the Kingston KC3000. The WD Black SN850 is 2% faster, and the Hynix P41/Solidigm P44 are 4% faster. Compared to PCIe 3.0 drives, the GM7000 4 TB is 1 to 10% faster, aging SATA drives are 25-40% slower.

Just like all other modern TLC drives, the GM7000 comes with an SLC cache that absorbs incoming writes at high speed, but uses three times the storage to do so. Our testing reveals that the SLC cache is allowed to fill the whole capacity of the disk, which is good, because it helps handling bursts of write activity, even if they are large. We were able to fill the whole drive at 1.85 GB/s, which is comparable to what competing drives offer.

Acer does include a heatsink with the GM7000, but I feel it's not an optimal solution. While there's some claims of "graphene," I wasn't able to confirm them. Also a heatsink that's mostly made of air pockets can't magically offer more heat transfer than a solid chunk of metal (that's more expensive though). In our thermal stress test, the GM7000 throttled after around two minutes, which is "alright," not "bad," certainly not "good." In that timeframe several hundreds of GB have been written, so it's a scenario that you'll very rarely encounter. The "throttled" state is quite well behaved though, performance only drops slightly, and doesn't fall off a cliff. Still, if you feel thermals are a problem, grab a cheap $10 metal heatsink, or use the heatsink that came with your motherboard.

The Acer Predator GM7000 4 TB is currently listed for $450, which is definitely not cheap. While it's not as crazy as the $500+ that Corsair, Kingston and others want for their 4 TB drives, I still feel it's a little bit on the high side, considering you can get WD Black SN850X for the same $450, with slightly higher performance and no thermal throttling, even without a heatsink. Another strong offering is the Silicon Power XS70 (Phison E18+B47R), which goes for $420. When looking for a high-end drive I probably wouldn't touch the QLC-based Gen 4 offerings that are selling for around $300. On the other hand, saving that much money could be tempting, with read-heavy workloads. Overall, the Acer Predator GM7000 is an excellent drive that will certainly find its place in the market. The fact that most of the competition is happening in the 1 TB and 2 TB space will help—many companies don't even offer a 4 TB version of most of their models.