Gigabyte Aorus RGB 512GB SSD Review

Gigabytes's Aorus RGB is the latest member of quite an exclusive club, namely SSD's with added bling in the shape of RGB lighting. Although the Gigabyte Aorus drive features RGB, it's subtly done and it certainly isn't over the top. The Aorus Falcon logo in the middle of the drive's heatsink is the lit up by the technology and although it needs a RGB supporting Gigabyte motherboard (X299 or Z390 Aorus) to control it properly, it cycled through its seven colours when installed in our test Asus motherboard without any problems.

The drive uses the tried and tested combination of a Phison E12 8-channel controller and Toshiba BiCS3 64-layer NAND. The 512GB drive is a dual sided design with the controller, cache chip and two of the four NAND packages the drive uses covered by the well designed and manufactured heatsink.

Gigabyte quote Sequential performance figures for the 512GB drive as up 3,480 MB/s for reads and up to 2,000 MB/s for writes, both figures we were able to confirm with the ATTO benchmark with the drive producing read/write figures of 3,414MB/s and 2,110MB/s respectively.

Gigabyte random 4K performance figures for the drive as up to 360,000 IOPS and 440,000 IOPS for read and write's respectively.  We couldn't get close to either of those figures with our QD4 4-threads tests, the fastest read IOPS figure we saw was 217,836 IOPS and for writes, 195,752 IOPS. However quickly testing the drive at a QD of 32 using 8 threads produced a maximum read figure of 389,512 IOPS and a write figure of some 549,025 IOPS.

Gigabyte's SSD Tool Box utility has had a bit of a refresh and although it doesn't have as many features as the management utilities of say Samsung or Western Digital for example, it's still a useful tool. With it you can monitor SSD Status as well as get general information such as model name, FW version, health and drive temperature. It also supports Secure Erase.

We found the 512GB Gigabyte Aorus RGB on CCL Computers for £92.99 (inc VAT) HERE

Pros.

• Overall performance.
• Endurance.
• RGB.

Cons.

• Only two capacities at present.
• Limited RGB compatibility.

KitGuru says: Gigabyte has gone down a tried and tested route with the NAND and controller for the Aorus RGB drive but that's no bad thing in this case. It's a fast performing drive with tasteful RGB and a pretty competitive price tag.

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