Introduction

Acer is a world-leading manufacturer of computer hardware. The company was founded in Taiwan in 1976, and is mostly known for their laptops, desktop PCs, and monitors. BIWIN Storage has been granted an official license by Acer to produce, market and sell solid-state-drives using their name.



Today we have our first review of a solid-state-drive using the new Silicon Motion SM2508 controller. The Acer Predator GM9000 comes with support for the fast PCI-Express 5.0 interface, but unlike most other vendors, they are not using a controller from Phison, but the newest controller from SMI. Silicon Motion has been taking notes during Phison's Gen 5 market dominance and engineered a controller that's optimized with power consumption in mind, to reduce the heat output, which lets them run without a noisy, active cooling solution. The NAND flash chips are Micron B58R 3D TLC with 232-layers. A DRAM cache chip is included, too, for the mapping tables of the SSD, using 2 GB of LPDDR4-3200

The Acer Predator GM9000 is available in capacities of 1 TB ($150), 2 TB ($215) and 4 TB ($430). Endurance for these models is set to 800 TBW, 1600 TBW and 3200 TBW, respectively. Acer offers a five-year warranty with the Predator GM9000 SSD.