Gigabyte Aorus 7000s 2TB SSD Review

Gigabyte's Aorus 7000s comes in a compact, well-built box that just has the Aorus logo on it. The box has an outer sleeve that has the Aorus logo and drives name on the front.

The back of the sleeve has multilingual details about the drive interface and Sequential read/write speeds.

The drive sits firmly in a high-density foam insert in the box.

The drive uses a well-designed aluminium heatsink that looks good in its silver and black finish but more importantly has a decent number of cooling fins along its length. The 7mm high heatsink has a nanocarbon coating which Gigabyte claim helps with heat dissipation. The heatsink comes in two parts, the finned top assembly and an aluminium base plate. Each of these parts has a thick dual-sided thermal pad that runs the length of the cooler with the drive sandwiched between the two pads. The top assembly is fixed to the base plate via four tiny screws so it's easily removed if you choose to use a motherboard M.2 cooling system.

The 2TB Aorus 7000s is built on a dual-sided format. One side of the PCB holds the Phison PS5018-E18 8-channel controller, four 256GB packages of Micron 96-layer 3D NAND and a 1GB SK hynix DDR4 cache chip. The reverse side of the board holds another four 256GB NAND packages and a second 1GB cache IC.

The Phison PS5018-E18 is an 8-channel controller built on a 12nm process supporting the latest NVMe 1.4 specifications. The 2nd generation PCIe Gen4 controller uses Triple ARM Cortex R5 CPUs together with a pair of CoXProcessor’s supporting an interface speed of up to 1,600MT/s per channel.

The E18 supports Phison’s 4th Gen LDPC engine and comes with End-To-End Data Path Protection. It supports AES 128/256bit hardware encryption and TCG & Opal 2.0, Pyrite, Sanitize and Crypto Erase technologies.

Gigabyte's SSD management utility for the 7000s is called the Aorus SSD Tool Box. It's been recently updated although it still remains pretty basic in comparison with some of its competitors.

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