Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 10000 2TB SSD

Rating: 9.0.

The first drive out of the blocks supporting the PCIe 5.0 interface is the AORUS Gen5 10000 from Gigabyte, sporting a combination of a Phison 8-channel controller and 232-layer 3D TLC NAND Flash. It also comes bundled with a humongous heatsink.

At launch, the AORUS 10000 comes in two capacities, 1TB and the 2TB model we are reviewing here. The drive is built around Phison's latest PS5026-E26 8-channel controller (the world's first consumer Gen 5 controller) which is matched up with Micron's 232-layer 3D TLC NAND Flash. The 2TB drive has 4GB of LPDDR4 cache while the 1TB drive makes do with 2GB.

Gigabyte only quotes Sequential performance figures for the drive on their website, the 2TB drive is rated up to 10,000 MB/s (hence the drive's name) for reads and up to 9,500MB/s for writes. The 1TB model gets read/write Sequential ratings of up to 9.500MB/s and 8,500MB/s respectively. When it comes to random performance, the PS5026-E26 controller supports 4K random read/write speeds of up to 1,500K IOPS and 2,000K IOPS respectively.

Power consumption for the 2TB drive is quoted at 10.5W for active reads, 11W for active writes and 85mW idle. Incidentally, the 1TB drive has the same idle rating with both active read and writes quoted as 10W.

Gigabyte rate the endurance of the 2TB drive as 1,400TBW and back the drive with a 5-year warranty.

Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 2TB.
NAND Components:  Micron 232-layer 3D TLC.
NAND Controller: Phison PS5026-E26 8-channel.
Cache: 4GB LPDDR4.
Interface: PCI-Express 5.0 x4, NVMe 2.0.
Form Factor: M.2, 2280.
Dimensions: (with heatsink) 92 x 23.5 x 44.7 mm, (without heatsink) 80 x 22 x 2.3 mm.

Firmware Version: EQFM21T0.

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