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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.
Gigabyte's AORUS Gen5 10000 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 plastic shell that slots into a high-density foam insert in the box. Under the drive, also sitting in high-density foam, is the huge cooler that Gigabyte provides with the drive.
The 2TB AORUS 10000 is built on a two-sided M.2 2280 format. One side holds the Phison PS5026-E26 controller, two packages of Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND Flash and one of the two 2GB LPDDR4 chips used to hold the mapping table. The other side of the PCB holds the remaining NAND packages and the second LPDDR4 IC.
Phison's PS5026-E26 is the first consumer Gen5 controller. The 8-channel controller is built on a 12nm process supporting up to 32TB of TLC or QLC NAND flash memory with data transfer speeds of up to 2400 MT/s. The controller uses dual Arm Cortex-R5 cores that work together with Phison’s specialized accelerators from its CoXProcessor 2.0 family. The controller supports Phison's 5th Generation LDPC ECC engine.
Gigabyte bundles a massive cooler with the drive that takes the total drive package dimensions up to 92 x 23.5 x 44.7mm (LxWxH) from the standard 80 x 22 x 2.3 mm, so you really do need to check all relevant motherboard clearances before installing the beastie.
The M.2 Thermal Guard XTREME uses two heat pipes and a stacked fin array, both with a Nanocarbon coating for maximum heat dissipation efficiency. The cooler comes in two parts, the fin array and the tray that holds the drive. Four very small screws are used to fix the two together. The drive is sandwiched between two dual-sided high-conductivity thermal pads that help transfer the heat to the stacked fin array.
The drive is supported by the SSD Tool utility in Gigabyte's comprehensive Control Center app. The utility supports real-time data on the performance, thermal stability and capabilities of the SSD.
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
PCIe Gen4 (2TB+ Class)
Corsair MP600 GS 2TB
Corsair MP600 PRO 2TB
Corsair MP600 PRO XT 2TB
Gigabyte AORUS 7000e 2TB
HP FX900 Pro 2TB
Kingston Fury Renegade Heatsink 2TB
Kingston KC3000 2TB
Kioxia Exceria Pro 2TB
Lexar Professional NM800PRO Heatsink 2TB
MSI Spatium M480 2TB
Patriot Viper VP4300 2TB
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 4TB
Samsung SSD990 PRO 2TB
Solidigm P41 Plus 2TB
Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB
WD Black SN850X Heatsink 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 the theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using v8.0.
In CrystalDiskMark 8's 4K QD1 T1 test, the Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 10000 sits in third place in our results table when it comes to reads with its test result of 85.28MB/s. Its write result of 328.73MB/s however, is by far the fastest we've seen to date for a consumer drive.
As can be seen from the benchmark result screens we can confirm the official Sequential read/write figures of 10,000MB/s and 9,500MB/s respectively with test result figures of 10,087MB/s for reads and 10,216MB/s for writes.
Using the Peak Performance profile of the CrystalDiskMark benchmark we could once again confirm the official Sequential read figure of 10,000 MB/s and bettered the official write figure by some 706MB/s.
We couldn't find any random performance figures for the drive on Gigabyte's specification sheet for the drive, but Phison rates the random 4K performance of the PS5026-E26 controller as up to 1,500K IOPS for reads and 2,000K IOPS for writes. We could confirm the official read figure with a test result of 1,494K IOPS while the write result of 1,733K IOPS is a little short of the official maximum.
Using the Real World profile the drive produced Sequential read/write figures of 8,564MB/s and 10,043MB/s respectively, well short of the official maximum for reads (10,000 MB/s) but on the mark when it came to writes (9,500MB/s).
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems 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.
We are using version 4.1 for our NVMe disk tests.
The 2TB AORUS Gen5 10000 is rated up to 10,000 MB/s for Sequential reads and up to 9,500MB/s for Sequential writes. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't hit the max read figure with a test result of 8,980MB/s. The write result actually was a little bit faster than the official figure at 9,540MB/s.
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 scenario.
AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
It comes as no real surprise to see the Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 10000 sitting on top of the hill in the AS SSD benchmark results. Its read and write scores of 4535 and 6766 respectively, are by far the fastest we've seen for a consumer M.2 NVMe drive.
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.
In this test, the read performance of the drive accelerates sharply from QD16 (8,579MB/s) to the end of the test run at QD32 with a result of 10,020.5MB/s. The write performance is much more consistent peaking at 10,186.2MB/s (QD8) before slowly falling back to finish the test run at 10,125.5MB/s.
128KB Sequential Read v QD Compared.
The drive tops the result charts through every tested queue depth by some margin although it must be said that WD'S Black SN850X Heatsink edition drive does narrow the gap at QD's 2 and 4.
128KB Sequential Write v QD Compared.
In the Sequential write test, the drive tops the charts by quite some margin at every tested queue depth. The closest any of the Gen4 drives gets is at QD1 where the WD Black SN850X Heatsink edition gets to within 1,371.22MB/s of Gigabyte's drive.
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 Thread count – 4.
In our four-treaded 4K random read tests we couldn't get close to the official maximum of 1,500K IOPS. The best figure we saw was 511,768 IOPS (QD16) before the performance dropped back to 511,506 IOPS at the end of the test (QD32).
4K Random Read v QD Performance Compared.
At QD1 the Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 10000 sits in third place behind HP's FX900 Pro and the NM800PRO from Lexar. After QD1 the Gigabyte drive pulls slowly from the Gen4 drives, the biggest gap occurring at QD32.
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 performance, the random write test results are nowhere near the official maximum figure of 2,000K IOPS in our four-threaded testing. The drive's performance is pretty consistent from QDs 2 to 32 with the peak result of 491,292 IOPS coming at the QD16 mark. Even though our test results couldn't get anywhere near the official figure, the drive still ranks as the fastest consumer NVMe drive we've seen to date.
4K Random Write v QD Performance Compared.
Gigabyte's AORUS Gen5 10000 drive leads the Gen4 drives by a considerable margin in all the tested queue depths.
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 a single thread, the AORUS Gen5 10000 performance climbs in a fairly smooth curve from 26,666 IOPS (109MB/s) at QD1 up to 166,740 IOPS (682MB/s) at QD8 where the performance begins to plateau out, finishing the test run (QD32) at 180,251 IOPS (738MB/s). Using four threads the performance climbs from 107,462 IOPS (440MB/s) at QD1 to 502,994 IOPS at QD16 where the performance levels off so that at the end of the test run the drive produces a result of 504,069 IOPS (2,064MB/s).
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.
4K Random Read.
In our lower queue depth, 4K random read tests there are no unexpected shocks as the performance smoothly increases as the queue depth deepens for each tested thread. At QD1 the performance ranged from a low point of 20,757 IOPS (85.02MB/s) for a single thread up to 83,945 IOPS (343MB/s) for four threads. At QD8 a single thread produced 158,758 IOPS (650MB/s), two threads 263,214 IOPS (1078MB/s), three threads 401,160 IOPs (1,643MB/s) and finally with four threads, 499,083 IOPS (2,044MB/s).
4K Random Write.
In the 4K write performance tests the performance rose quickly from QD1 to QD2, especially using three and four threads but then levelled off for the remainder of the test run for all the tested threads.
In our read-throughput tests, the 2TB AORUS Gen5 10000 peaked at the 1MB block mark at 7,611MB/s, a good deal short of the maximum official figure of 10,000MB/s. After the 1MB mark, the performance of the drive drops considerably but it recovers quickly to finish the test run at 7,496MB/s.
Even though that peak read result of 7,611MB/s is nowhere near the official maximum figure. it's still good to enough to place the drive in top spot in our results chart by some distance.
During the write throughput test, the drive peaked at 10,001MB/s (8MB block) before finishing the test run down slightly at 9,809MB/s. Both figures are faster than the official maximum of 9,500MB/s.
It comes as no surprise to find the tested peak write result puts the drive on the top of the results chart
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 the 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 the 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 fastest individual trace result came from the Adobe Photoshop heavy usage trace at 1,455MB/s. The drive averaged 319.83MB/s for the six Adobe start-up test traces and 672MB/s for the five usage traces including the Photoshop heavy usage one.
When it came to the file transfers, the fastest was the cp1 Write test at 7,000MB/s not only the fastest result from this drive, it's the fastest we've ever seen using this test trace.
The overall bandwidth figure of 747.1MB/s sees the drive sitting in top spot in the results chart.
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 AORUS Gen5 10000 produced an average bandwidth figure of 1,058MB/s for the three-game load tests (Battlefield V, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Overwatch) with an average access time of 50µs for the same three games.
The overall average bandwidth figure of 806.72MB/s for the complete test run puts the drive firmly at the top of the results chart.
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.
The Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 10000 does very well in the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark topping each chart with the fastest scene loading times we've seen to date.
We took note of the drive’s temperature during our benchmarking runs. We ran our tests with the M.2 Thermal Guard XTREME heatsink installed that Gigabyte bundles with the drive. As it's such a large chunk of cooler and may be difficult to fit on some motherboards we also re-ran the tests using the motherboard's SSD cooling solution to see if it could cope with keeping the drive cool.
With the M.2 Thermal Guard XTREME heatsink fitted the hottest the drive got was when being pushed extremely hard during repeated runs of the CrystalDiskMark 8 Sequential read and write tests as well as runs of the ATTO benchmark where the drive got to 48° C, some 22° C below the stated maximum of 70° C but there didn't appear to be any throttling issues. For the bulk of our non-4 K testing the drive's temperature averaged around 38° C. For the 4K testing, it averaged just over 33° C.
Our test rig for PCIe Gen5 drives is based around Gigabyte's X670E AORUS Xtreme motherboard which has a serious chunk of machined aluminium (weighing in at 150g) as a heatsink for the Gen5 slot. Not only that, there are two thermal pads that the drive is sandwiched between for maximum heat displacement. Using this heatsink the drive's temperature averaged 36° C for the non-4K tests and 33° C for the 4K-based tests.
So from our testing experiences, it appears that if you just don't have the space for the M.2 Thermal Guard XTREME heatsink, then all is not lost as long as the motherboard you are installing the drive in, has very good and efficient integrated cooling, then the drive should be ok.
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 Gen4 PCIe drive.
Transfer Details
Windows 10 backup – 118GB.
Data file – 100GB.
BluRay Movie – 42GB.
Windows 11 iso – 5.4GB.
File folder – 50GB – 28,523 files.
Steam folder – 222GB (8 games: Alien Isolation, Battlefield 4, BioShock Infinite, Crysis 3, Grand Theft Auto V, Shadow Of Mordor, Skyrim, The Witcher3 Wild Hunt).
Movie demos 8K – 21GB – (11 demos).
Raw Movie Clips 4K – 16GB – (9 MP4V files).
Movie folder – 12GB – 15 files – (8 @ .MKV, 4 @ .MOV, 3 @ MP4).
Photo Folder – 10GB – 304 files – (171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG).
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 drive averaged 4,673MB/s when writing the 18 transfer tests, with the fastest being the 7,265MB/s for the Windows 11 iso transfer and the slowest being the 50GB file folder transfer at 772MB/s. Reading back the data the average was a bit faster at 4,750MB/s. Once again the crown for the fastest transfer went to the Windows 11 iso. The slowest transfer was again the 50GB file folder at 1,512MB/s.
Motherboard manufacturers have been proudly boasting about having motherboards with PCIe 5.0 supporting M.2 slots for a while without there actually being anything remotely Gen5 to stick in them. Well all that changes with the launch of Gigabyte's AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD. What's with the “10000” part of the name you might ask, ah well that's the official maximum Sequential read rating for the drive, well for the 2TB drive to be exact, 10,000MB/s. The official Sequential write figure for the 2TB drive is pretty impressive too, up to 9,500MB/s.
The drive is built around a combination of a Phison controller and Micron NAND with 4GB of LPDDR4 cache thrown in for good measure. The Phison PS5026-E26 is the first consumer Gen5 controller to market and has been designed to support current and future types of 3D NAND memory featuring ONFI 5.X and Toggle 5.X interfaces with transfer rates of up to 2400 MT/s. The drive also supports the NVMe 2.0 specification.
Built on a 12nm process using dual Arm Cortex-R5 cores together with Phison’s CoXProcessor 2.0 accelerators the 8-channel controller can support up to 32TB of TLC and QLC NAND flash memory and is the first Phison controller to ship with the companies I/O+ Technology that amplifies the solution's ability to perform at high levels under severe sustained workloads that otherwise cause a drive real problems. The drive uses the latest Micron (B58R) 232-layer 3D TLC NAND.
At launch, the AORUS Gen5 10000 comes in just two capacities, 2TB and 1TB. As noted above the 2TB drive is rated at up to 10,000MB/s and up to 9,500MB/s for reads and writes respectively. The 1TB drive makes do with up to 9,500MB/s for reads and up to 8,500MB/s for writes. There is no mention of random performance on the drives spec sheet but the PS5026-E26 controller supports random 4K speeds of up to 1,500K IOPS for reads and up to 2,000K IOPS for writes.
Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't quite get to the maximum Sequential read figure of 10,000MB/s with a test result of 8,980MB/s. However, the tested write result bettered the official 9,500MB/s figure producing a figure of 9,540MB/s. Using the default CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark we could confirm and even better the official ratings, reads a little and writes a fair bit. The default read result was 10,087MB/s while the write result of 10,216MB/s bettered the official maximum by 676MB/s.
The best random performance we saw came from the Peak Performance profile at 1,494K IOPS for reads and 1,733K IOPS for writes. The settings for this test part of the test profile really push the drive, with a queue depth of 32 using 16 threads so it's pretty extreme. The Real World profile uses a QD of 1 with a single thread and this produced a not-very awe-inspiring read result of 20,905 IOPS with writes at 80,209 IOPS.
Bundled with the drive is the M.2 Thermal Guard XTREME dual heat pipe cooler. This is an impressive beast of a cooler and one that's so big (92 x 23.5 x 44.7mm (LxWxH)) that very careful measurements have to be taken to see if can be installed. To give an idea of how big it is we had to change the CPU cooler we were going to use to a slightly smaller one to make sure it would fit, even then it was pretty tight fit.
When it comes to Sequential performance the Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 10000 is miles ahead of its Gen4 competition but in some of our 4K random testing, the gap between Gen4 and Gen5 drives isn't as big as one might expect. In fact in the CrystalDiskMark 8 4K QD1 1 Thread test the Gigabyte drive lies in third place for random reads behind the heatsink editions of Lexar's Professional NM800PRO and WD's Black SN850X Gen4 drives.
We found the Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 1000 on Tekshop247 for £332.62 inc VAT HERE
Pros
- Extremely fast Sequential performance.
- PCIe 5.0 interface.
Cons
- Needs a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot to get the best performance.
- Use of the bundled heatsink needs careful planning.
- Some random performance results a little lacklustre.
- Pricey.
Kitguru says: Gigabyte's AORUS Gen5 10000 offers blazingly Sequential speeds both for reads and writes but the random performance in some scenarios isn't as impressive. But it's very early days for the Gen5 interface and no doubt there will be firmware tweaks to come as well as more optimised NAND to team up with the Phison E26 and any other controllers to come.
