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We recently looked at the flagship 4TB drive of Biwin's new Black Opal X570 PRO (HERE) Gen 5 drive range. Now, we are looking at the drive in the middle of the range, the 2TB X570 PRO.
At the heart of the X570 PRO is a new controller we've not come across before from Silicon Motion, the SM2508. The SM2508 is an 8-channel controller designed to offer high-end performance together with power efficiency achieved by a 6nm build process and a Flash interface running at a full 3,600 MT/s speed. For the X570 PRO Biwin has combined the controller with 232-layer TLC NAND.
The 2TB drive is the middle drive of a three-drive line up, the other drives being the 1TB and 4TB capacities. The 2TB drive is officially rated at up to 14,000MB/s for Sequential reads and up to 13,000MB/s for writes. Incidentally, the other two drives are also rated at up to 14,000MB/s for reads with the 4TB drive getting the same 13,000MB/s write figure as the 2TB drive with the 1TB drive back at up to 10,500MB/s.
Random reads for the 2TB drive are quoted as up to 2000K IOPS with writes at up to 1600K IOPS. The other two drives have the same write speed with the 4TB drive rated as up to 2000K for reads and the 1TB drive up to 1600K IOPS.
The endurance figure quoted for the 2TB drive is 1,500 TBW with the 4TB model at 3,000 TBW and the 1TB drive 750 TBW. The drives are backed by a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 2TB
NAND Components: 232-layer TLC NAND.
NAND Controller: Silicon Motion SM2508.
Cache: 4GB LPDDR4.
Interface: PCIe Gen 5 x4, NVMe 2.0.
Form Factor: M.2
Dimensions: 80 x 22 x 2.5 mm.
Drive Weight: 9g
Firmware Version: FWX1221A
The drive comes in a compact box with a clear image of the drive on the front. Under the image is the drive capacity. The rear of the box has a small window in the middle of it, which shows the product label on the rear of the drive. To the left of this window is a limited specification list for the drive while on the other side of the window is a QR code that gives you access to the Quick Start Guide, warranty and additional product information.
Like the 4TB X570 PRO, the 2TB model is built on a single-sided PCB (components on one side of the PCB). Sitting under the graphene thermal pad, which the front product label is fixed to, is the Silicon Motion’s SM2508 controller, two packages of 232-layer TLC NAND and a 2GB DRAM IC (the size of the DRAM is based on drive capacity at the ratio of 1GB per 1TB),
Silicon Motion’s SM2508 controller is a new one to us. The 8-channel controller has been designed to offer both high performance and power efficiency. Built on a 6nm process, the SM2508 uses a quad-core ARM Cortex R8 CPU that supports four 32Gb/s PCIe lanes. The NAND channels have a bus rate of up to 3,600 MT/s each which provides up to 14.5 GB/s and 14 GB/s sequential (read and write, respectively) performance and up to 2.5M/2.5M IOPS random read/write performance. Using a 6nm process together with a proprietary built-in smart clock-gating mechanism, which intelligently and automatically powers down unused blocks allows the SM2508 to be very efficient when it comes to power consumption (Silicon Motion claim 30% active power reduction over the previous generation IC).
Biwin makes it even easier to install the drive as they have provided a M.2 fixing screw (take care not the lose it when you open the plastic shell that protects the drive) and a handy little screwdriver are bundled with the drive
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, 32GB DDR5-6000, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 and a Gigabyte AORUS X670E Xtreme motherboard.
Other drives
Biwin Black Opal X570 PRO 4TB
ADATA Legend 970 2TB|
Corsair MP700 PRO SE 4TB
Corsair MP700 PRO 2TB
Corsair MP700 Elite 2TB
Crucial T705 2TB
Crucial T700 2TB
Crucial T700 with Heatsink 2TB
Gigabyte AORUS 10000 2TB
Klevv Genuine G360 2TB
Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark 4.
CrystalMark 8.0.0.
AS SSD 2.0.
IOMeter.
UL Solutions PC Mark 10.
UL Solutions 3DMark Storage Benchmark.
Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark.
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using v8.0.5.
Biwin's 2TB Black Opal X570 PRO sits mid-table just below the 4TB model in the CrystalDiskMark 8 4K QD1 T1 test, with a read score of 86.69MB/s (identical to the larger version) and 300.49MB/s for writes.
As can be seen from the benchmarking screens, we can confirm the official sequential ratings of the drive of up to 14,000MB/s for reads and up to 13,000MB/s for writes and even better them with default test figures of 14,283.59MB/s for reads and 13,227.19MB/s for writes. Looking at both sets of result screens, it appears that the Silicon Motion controller doesn't have much of a preference in the type of data it's being asked to deal with.
That 14,283MB/s read result places the 2TB X570 PRO in fourth place on the results chart just behind the 4TB version of the drive. It's read result is 88MB/s slower than its larger sibling while the 2TB write result is 181MB/s slower.
Peak Performance Profile
The 2TB X570 PRO is officially rated as up to 2000K IOPS for random reads and up to 1600K IOPS for random writes. Using the Peak Performance profile test of CrystalDiskMark 8 we couldn't quite get to those official maximums. The best read result we saw was 1,898,871 IOPS with the best write figure at 1,528,129 IOPS. Although we couldn't confirm the official figures, the random read result is the fastest we've seen to date for a consumer Gen 5 drive and both results are faster than what the 4TB drive produced.
Once again we could confirm the official sequential figures with Peak Performance profile test results of 14,219MB/s for reads and 13,240MB/s for writes.
Real World Profile
The 2TB X570 PRO sits very close to the bottom of the CrystalDiskMark 8 Real World result table with a read score of 7,247MB/s. However, its write score of 10.663MB/s is the fourth fastest we've seen for a Gen 5 SSD in this test.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage system's performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement, including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.
Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data.
We are using version 4.1 for our NVMe disk tests with a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance.
Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't hit the official read and write sequential figures of up to 14,000MB/s and 13,00MB/s for read and writes respectively but with test figures of 13,940MB/s for reads and 12,340MB/s for writes, we were certainly in the ball park. Those result figures may be shy of the official maximums, but the read result is good enough for the drive to take over from the 4TB model at the top of the chart.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. It uses
incompressible data samples, which many drives struggle with, so results can be viewed as the worst case scenarios.
AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
The X570 PRO's read score of 5894 in the AS SSD benchmark sees it in first place in the results table by some distance from the next best, the 4TB X570 PRO. However, its write score of 6745 isn't quite as impressive in relation to some other drives in this test.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the Sequential read and write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
128KB Sequential Read / Write.
Transfer Request Size: 128KB, Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
Using this Sequential test, the results confirmed the official Sequential ratings of the drive of up to 14,000MB/s and 13,000MB/s for read and write respectively with figures of 14,201MB/s for reads (QD32) and 13,4241MB/s (QD8) for writes.
128KB Sequential Read performance v QD compared.
At QD1 the drive sits in fifth sport on the result chart, 39MB/s faster than the 4TB drive. But as the queue depth deepens, the drive drops down the chart, but just like the 4TB X570 PRO it stages a comeback at QD32 ending up in third spot behind the 4TB model.
128KB Sequential Write performance v QD compared.
When it comes to Sequential writes, at QD1 it is the fastest Gen5 consumer drive we've seen to date in this test. At QD2 it has fallen down the chart, sitting just outside the top five but by QD's 4 and 32 it has climbed back up to sit in second place behind the 4TB X570.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the 4K random read performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
Transfer Request Size: 4KB, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
Using our 4-threaded random tests, we couldn't come anywhere close to the official maximum random read figure of up to 2,000,000 IOPS, the best we saw was 504,714 IOPS at QD16 before the performance dropped back to finish the test run (QD32) at 502,888 IOPS.
4K Random Read Performance v QD compared
At QDs 1 & 2 the drive sits in third and fourth place respectively in the results chart. However, as the queue depth deepens, the drive drops down the table so by QD32 it is holding the table up.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the 4K random write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
Transfer Request Size: 4KB, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
As with the random read results, we couldn't get close to the official maximum of 1,600,000 IOPS using our four threaded tests. The best we saw was 426,310 IOPS at QD16. After this peak, the performance dropped slightly to finish the test run at QD32 at 423,710 IOPS.
4K Random Write Performance v QD compared
The tested random write performance of the drive isn't as strong as the random reads. It sits in the bottom half of the results table for all the tested queue depths and props up the table at QD1.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8’s custom settings to test the 4K 70/30 mixed read/write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths using a single thread and four threads.
Using four threads, the 2TB X570 PRO produces a test result of 111,143 IOPS (455,24MB/s) at QD1 rising to a peak of 477,294 IOPS (1,955MB/s) at QD16 before falling back slightly to finish the test run at 474,345 IOPS at QD32.
Dropping down to a single thread the drive produced a test result of 26,162 IOPS (107.16MB/s) at QD1 rising up to 172,965 IOPS (709.09MB/s) at QD32.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8 to test the random performance of the drive at lower queue depths (QD1 – QD8 where most of the everyday workloads occur) using 1 to 4 threads.
Random Reads
In the random read tests, all four of the tested threads displayed smooth increases in performance as the queue depth deepened. Test results at QD1 ranged from 20,435 IOPS (83.7MB/s) with a single thread up to 87,941 IOPS (360.2MB/s) using four threads.
Random Writes
In the 4K write tests, the performance rose quickly from QD1 to QD2 (with three and four threads being the fastest) and then a slower rate of rise from QD2 to QD4 before the performance appeared to start levelling off.
In our read-throughput tests, the performance of the 2TB X570 PRO climbed pretty smoothly through the block marks, peaking at the end of the test run at 9,344MB/s, a wee bit faster than the 4TB version of the drive.
Even though the peak read result is nowhere near the official maximum figure of 14,000MB/s, it's still good enough to place the drive in the fourth spot on the results table and above the 4TB version of the X570 PRO by 114MB/s.
In the write-throughput test, the drive starts to plateau out between 128KB and 256KB before picking up the pace again, peaking at the end of the test run at 11,731MB/s. As with the read result, this is short of the official maximum of 13,000MB/s but it is closer to the official figure than the peak read result.
Although the tested peak write result of 11,731MB/s is somewhat short of the official maximum, it is still good enough to put the drive in second place behind Klevv's GENUINE G560 and 98.7MB/s ahead of the 4TB X570 PRO.
The PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The benchmark is designed to measure performance of fast system drives using the SATA bus at the low end and devices connected via PCI Express at the high end.
The goal of the benchmark is to show meaningful real-world performance differences between fast storage technologies such as SATA, NVMe, and Intel’s Optane. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses 23 traces, running 3 passes with each trace. It typically takes an hour to run.
Traces used:
Booting Windows 10.
Adobe Acrobat – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Illustrator – starting the application until usable Adobe Premiere Pro – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Photoshop – starting the application until usable.
Battlefield V – starting the game until the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4 – starting the game until the main menu.
Overwatch – starting the game until main menu.
Using Adobe After Effects.
Using Microsoft Excel.
Using Adobe Illustrator.
Using Adobe InDesign.
Using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Using Adobe Photoshop (heavy use).
Using Adobe Photoshop (light use).
cp1 Copying 4 ISO image files, 20 GB in total, from a secondary drive to the target drive (write test).
cp2 Making a copy of the ISO files (read-write test).
cp3 Copying the ISO to a secondary drive (read test).
cps1Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, to the target drive (write test).
cps2 Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
cps3 Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test).
The drive averaged 330MB/s for the six Adobe startup traces, the fastest being 439MB/s for the Premiere Pro startup test with the slowest being the 227MB/s using the Lightroom startup test trace.
When tested with the Adobe usage traces, the 2TB X570 PRO averaged 682.6MB/s for the five tests, which includes the 1,425MB/s result for the Adobe Photoshop heavy usage trace. The slowest of the five traces was the InDesign trace at 290MB/s
For the gaming part of the benchmark, the drive averaged 1,054.33MB/s for the three game traces. Fastest was Battlefield V at 1,426MB/s, next up was Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 at 1,182MB/s and the slowest of the three was Overwatch at 575MB/s.
In the file transfer tests the 2TB X570 PRO averaged 3,564MB/s for the six tests with the fastest being the Write Test (cp1) at 6,901MB/s.
With an overall bandwidth figure of 740.74MB/s, the 2TB X570 PRO is a tiny bit faster than the 4TB version of the drive.
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark uses traces recorded from popular games and gaming-related activities to measure real-world gaming performance.
Traces used:
Battlefield V
Loading Battlefield™ V from launch to the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4
Loading Call of Duty®: Black Ops 4 from launch to the main menu.
Overwatch
Loading Overwatch® from launch to the main menu.
Game Move
Copying the Steam folder for Counter-Strike®: Global Offensive from an external SSD to the system drive.
Game Recording
Recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch®.
Installing Game
Installing The Outer Worlds® from the Epic Games Launcher.
Game Saving
Saving progress in The Outer Worlds game.
In 3DMark’s Storage Test, the drive had an average game loading bandwidth figure for the three games of 1,031MB/s (good enough for fourth place in the results table), with an average access time figure of 49µs (0.049m/s). The bandwidth figure for the 2TB X570 PRO is 92MB/s slower than the 4TB version of the drive.
In the game moving, recording, installing and saving test traces, the drive averaged 1,500.86MB/s (with an average access time of 32µs 0.032m/s) which is slightly better than the 4TB version of the X570 PRO.
The overall average bandwidth figure for the 2TB X570 PRO for the complete benchmark run was 757.94MB/s, slightly slower than the 762.15MB/s that the 4TB drive achieved.
The Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark uses actual maps and playable characters to assign a score to your PC and rate its performance including scene loading times.
The benchmark gives an overall load time as well as loading times by scene.
Just like the 4TB version, the 2TB X570 PRO doesn't seem to handle the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark particularly well as it ends up in the lower half of the overall results chart. The drive appears to handle the Load Scene 1 test the best out of the five traces.
We took note of the drive’s temperature during some of our benchmarking runs.
Biwin's Black Opal X570 PRO doesn't come with a heatsink but it does use a graphene thermal pad under the product label. This, together with the lower power consumption that 6nm architecture of the controller brings to the table, seems to keep the drive reasonably cool during use, even when it was being pushed hard during benchmarking. The hottest the drive got was when being pushed hard during some of the CrystalDiskMark 8's Write tests where it got to 57° C. For the bulk of our testing, the drive averaged 45° C with the 4K focussed tests averaging 40° C.
To test real-life performance of a drive, we use a mix of folder/file types, and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of the drive reading from & writing to a 2TB Kingston KC3000.
Transfer Details
Data file – 100GB.
File folder – 50GB – 28,523 files.
Movie demos 8K – 21GB – (11 demos).
Raw Movie Clips 4K – 16GB – (9 MP4V files).
Audio Folder – 10GB – 1,483 files – (1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files).
Single large image – 5GB – 1.5bn pixel photo.
3D Printer File Folder – 4.25GB – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds).
AutoCAD File Folder – 1.5GB (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF).
The 2TB Biwin Black Opal X570 PRO averaged 4,135MB when writing the 8 transfer tests, with the fastest being the 7,092MB/s (15sec) for the 100GB Data file with the slowest being the 50GB File Folder transfer at 534MB/s (101sec). Reading back the data, the average was 4,496MB/s with the 100GB Data file again being the fastest at 5,889MB/s (18sec).
You may never have heard of them, but BIWIN, the Chinese OEM manufacturer of high-performance memory and storage solutions, have been around since 2010. Their latest range of SSDs, the X570 PRO, are the company's first Gen 5 drives, sitting under BWIN's Black Opal gaming division. The X570 PRO model lineup consists of three capacities, 1TB, 2TB and the flagship 4TB drive. We've already taken a look at the flagship drive HERE, but now it's the turn of the midrange drive, the 2TB X570 PRO.
The 2TB X570 PRO is officially rated as up to 14,000MB/s and 13,000MB/s for Sequential reads and writes respectively. That 14,000MB/s Sequential read rating is the same for all three drives in the lineup. The 4TB drive has the same up to 13,000MB/s write rating as the 2TB drive and the 1TB model gets a up to 10,500MB/s.
As for random performance, all three drives are rated as up to 1,600,000 IOPS for writes with the 2TB and 4TB drives having the same up to 2,000,000 IOPS figure for reads with the 1TB getting up to 1,600,000 IOPS.
The X570 PRO is a single-sided design with the controller being joined by two 232-layer NAND packages and a DRAM IC (in the case of the 2TB drive this is a 2GB chip).
At the heart of the X570 PRO is a controller we've never come across before from Silicon Motion, the SM2508. This controller promises the holy grail for Gen 5 SSDs – high end performance together with reduced power consumption. The SM2508 is the world’s first PCIe Gen5 client SSD controller using TSMC’s 6nm EUV process and its the 6nm process that holds the key to lower power consumption. Silicon Motion claim the controller offers a 50% reduction in power consumption compared to 12nm controllers, 7x better power efficiency than PCIe Gen4 SSDs and up to 70% better than current competitive PCIe Gen5 drives.The SM2508 uses quad-core ARM Cortex R8 CPU architecture supporting a flash interface running at up to 3600 MT/s. The X570 PRO has the controller combined with 232-layer 3D TLC NAND.
Using the default CrystalDiskMark 8 tests we could not only confirm the official up to 14,000MB/s and 13,000MB/s Sequential read/write maximum figures but we got a little more out of the drive with test results of 14,283MB/s for reads and 13,227MB/s for writes.
When it came to random performance, we couldn't get close to the official 2,000,000 IOPS maximum figure with our 4-threaded tests. The best random read figure we saw was 504,714 IOPS at QD16. The best write performance also came at QD16, 426,310 IOPS. Switching over to the default Peak Performance Profile in CrystalDiskMark 8, we still couldn't confirm the official maximums, but got a lot closer to them with a best read result of 1,898,871 IOPS with 1,528,129 IOPS for writes, both of which are faster than the 4TB drive we looked at.
To keep the X570 PRO cool, the drive uses a graphene thermal pad under the product label, which together with the 6nm design of the controller works well. The hottest the drive got while under testing was 57° C when it was being pushed hard.
We found the 2TB version of the Biwin Black Opal X570 PRO on Amazon for £239.99 (inc VAT) HERE but until the 7th of March, there is a £15 discount voucher available for the 2TB drive.
Pros
- Sequential speeds.
- Overall performance.
- Endurance.
Cons
- Write speeds in some benchmark tests.
Kitguru says We thought the 4TB Biwin Black Opal X570 PRO was rather good, but in some of our tests the 2TB version was even faster. Using a combination of the latest controller from Silicon Motion and a graphene thermal pad, it doesn't need the massive heatsink so often seen on high performance Gen 5 drives.
