Gigabyte AORUS NVMe Gen4 SSD GP-ASM2NE6100TTTD 1 TB

One of the world's first PCI-E 4.0 SSDs

In the past couple of years, the Taiwanese brand Gigabyte has been actively promoting its AORUS line of products for gamers and enthusiasts. Moreover, it does it quite skillfully, combining a competent pricing policy and innovations. For example, the hero of this review with an unpronounceable name GP-ASM2NE6500GTTD was almost the first solid state drive in east european retail that worked on the fourth generation PCI-E bus. Since then, several more drives have been released in the series, but this particular option remains one of the most attractive in terms of price, quality and characteristics.

Phison E16 dual core controller

The drive is based on Toshiba's 96-layer 3D NAND TLC flash memory, which is controlled by a dual-core Phison E16 controller capable of processing up to 8 data streams simultaneously. Complementing the picture is a 2 GB DDR4 cache buffer. The Gigabyte AORUS has a sequential read speed limit of 5000MB/s and a sequential write speed of 4400MB/s. By the standards of 2022, these characteristics are no longer as impressive as they were 2 years ago, but in reality, AORUS is still a lightning-fast drive that is ready to serve faithfully in a gaming laptop, even in a brand new PS5. For example, when copying from an SSD to the internal memory of a 60+ GB gaming distribution console, it took him 2.33 minutes. Slightly more expensive Samsung 980 PRO and WD Black SN850 managed exactly the same time.

Rich

At the same time, both competitors cannot boast of having a radiator. But Gigabyte has one of the coolest heat spreaders in our memory. Gigabyte decided to abandon the traditional aluminium heatsink and used a "colder" copper, thanks to which the memory controller never crossed the border at 69 °C in stress tests, and the drive itself was in order and did not throttle. At the same time, the copper radiator imitates gilding and looks, as they say, rich. In an open stand with address lighting, this is generally excellent. To be honest, it's not entirely clear why someone should pay almost one and a half times more for the new AORUS 7000s.