Gigabyte Aorus 7000s 2TB SSD Review

There's an ever-increasing number of second-generation PCIe Gen4 x 4 drives hitting the market. One of the latest is from Gigabyte in the shape of the Aorus 7000s series.

At the time of writing this review, the product line-up of the 7000S consists of just two drives, the 1TB and the flagship 2TB (the drive that's being reviewed here). Of all the second generation drives we seen to date the most common controller/NAND combination is Phison's second-generation controller, the PS5018-E18 teamed up with 96-layer 3D TLC NAND, and the Aorus 7000s doesn't deviate from that pattern.

Officially the drive is rated for up to 7,000MB/s and up to 6,850MB/s for Sequential read and writes respectively. Testing the drive with the ATTO benchmark we couldn't quite hit those maximums, the best we saw was 6,820MB/s for reads and 6,440MB/s for writes. Switching over to CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark we could indeed confirm the official maximum Sequential read figure and even bettered it with the best test result of 7,446MB/s. The best Sequential write result of 6,769MB/s was however still shy of the official figure.

We could also confirm and even better a little the official maximum 4K random read figure of up 650,000 IOPS with a CDM 8 score of 659,510.99 IOPS. However as with the Sequential writes, the best random write figure of 601,004.88 IOPS some way short of the 700,000 IOPS official maximum.

The latest Gen4 drives produce blistering performance, but they are also pretty power hungry and produce a fair old amount of heat when pushed hard. We've seen drives like Corsair's MP600 PRO and PNY's XLR8 CS3140 using large heatsinks to tackle the heat question, and Corsair even take it one step further with the MP600 PRO Hydro X which supports water cooling.

Gigabyte has used an elegant looking finned aluminium heatsink, just 7mm high with a nanocarbon coating to help with heat dissipation on the Aorus 7000s. Should you want to make use of any motherboard M.2 cooling features then the good news is that the heatsink is easily removable by undoing four tiny screws. Not to be outdone by some of the larger heatsinks that adorn some Gen4 drives, Gigabyte also offers the 7000s ‘Prem.' version of the drive which has a massive twin heatpipe cooler that adds around 12mm to the length of the drive and 33.3mm to the height.

We found the 2TB version of Gigabyte's Aorus 7000s on Amazon UK for 364.99 (inc VAT) HERE.

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Pros

• Overall performance.
• Endurance.
• Well designed and effective heatsink.

Cons

• Couldn't match the maximum official random write 4K figures.
• Tool Box utility is a bit basic.

KitGuru says: The 2TB Aorus 7000s is Gigabyte's fastest single drive SSD model to date. It comes with a well-designed heatsink that works well and should prevent any throttling, with the added bonus of being easy to remove should you want to use any integrated motherboard cooling solution.

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