The Drive

The Gigabyte Aorus NVMe Gen4 SSD uses four flash chips and two DRAM chips, which all feed data into a Phison SSD controller.


Gigabyte includes a large heatsink with their drive, which is surprisingly heavy due to generous amounts of copper. Unlike other heatsinks, it completely enshrouds the drive, providing cooling from top and bottom.


The Phison PS5016-E16-32 is a brand-new eight-channel SSD controller that was first shown at Computex Taiwan this year. Internally, it uses a dual-core ARM controller paired with two "CO-X processor cores", which seem to be some kind of Phison-proprietary acceleration unit.


Toshiba's TABHG65AWV flash chips are BiCS4 3D TLC NAND, using 96 layers.


Two of these SKhynix H5AN8GNCJRVKC DDR4-2133 DRAM chips provide 2 GB of fast memory for the controller's mapping tables.