Introduction

Netac is a flash storage expert company based out of Shenzen, China. It was founded in 1999 and has always had a focus on flash-based products, like USB sticks and memory cards, but also DRAM-based memory like DDR4. While the company's main focus of operation is their OEM business, producing flash products for various clients, they are now making a big push to enter the DIY retail space with their own products.



The Netac NV7000 is a high-end M.2 NVMe drive using the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface. Internally, it is based on the highly popular combination of Phison E18 controller and 176-layer B47R TLC flash memory from Micron. This means it shares the same design elements with famous drives like the Corsair MP600 Pro LPX, Kingston KC3000, Seagate FireCuda 530, MSI M480 Play, Team Group Cardea A440 Pro, and others. In order to keep heat levels down and ensure compatibility with the Sony PlayStation 5, Netac pre-installed a heatsink on the NV7000, and a DRAM cache is included, too.

The Netac NV7000 comes in capacities of 1 TB ($180), 2 TB ($350), and 4 TB ($700). Endurance for these models is set to 700 TBW, 1400 TBW, and 3000 TBW respectively. Netac includes a five-year warranty with the NV7000 SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Netac NV7000 connects to the host system using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, eight flash chips, and two DRAM chips.


The Netac NV7000 comes with the heatsink preinstalled. It's a sleek metal clamshell design that fits the PS5 case perfectly. The mounting mechanism uses four screws and two sticky thermal pads.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5018-E18 is Phison's PCI-Express 4.0 controller with eight channels. It is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses five Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores. The E18 supports NVMe 1.4, TLC, DDR4 memory, and up to 32 dies.


The eight flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


Two Hynix DDR4-2666 chips provide a total of 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup