Netac NV7000-t 2TB SSD Review

Netac may be a new name to some but the company based in Shenzen, China was founded in 1999 and are experts in flash-based storage. The latest addition to their range of PCIe Gen 4 NVMe drives is the NV7000-t.

At the time of writing the product lineup as per the Netac website is made up of three capacities; 512GB, 1TB and 2TB, the drive we are looking at here. However, just recently a flagship 4TB drive has been released but it seems the product page hasn't been updated to include it yet.

At the heart of the NV700-t is a Maxiotech MAP1602A 4-channel controller. A DRAM-less design, the MAP1602A makes use of Host Memory Buffer (HMB) 3.0 technology which uses system memory instead of a dedicated cache chip. The drive also makes use of Dynamic SLC cache writing technology. Another trick up its sleeve is that it uses a fast 2400 MT/s flash interface which helps performance. The drive uses YMTC 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash, and the 2TB version of the NV7000-t uses four 512GB NAND packages.

Netac rates the Sequential performance for the 2TB version of the NV7000-t as up to 7,300MB/s for reads and 6,700MB/s for writes. Testing the drive with the ATTO benchmark we failed to reach those maximum figures, the best figures we saw were 6,920MB/s for reads and 5,910MB/s for writes. Switching over to the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark we could confirm the official read figure with a best default test result of 7,437MB/s. However, the write figure was still short of the maximum figure at 6,485MB/s.

As for 4K random performance, Netac rates the NV7000-t as up to 900,000 IOPS for reads and up to 700,000 IOPS for writes. With our four-threaded testing, the best read figure we saw was 632,355 IOPS (QD32) so way short of the official maximum. However, even though the drive was short of the official figure, the drive was the fastest Gen 4 drive we've seen to date through all the featured queue depths – 1, 2, 4 and 32.

The best random write figure we saw from our four thread testing was 500,960 IOPS so again well short of the official figure. Although it's not the fastest Gen 4 drive when it comes to random writes, it maintained third position in the results charts for three out of the four featured queue depths – 1, 4, and 32 and only dropped one place at QD2. Using the default Peak Performance Profile in CrystalDiskMark 8 we could confirm the official random figures and indeed better them, with reads at 947,658 IOPS and writes at 1,081,518 IOPS.

The NV7000-t is supported by Netac's SSD management utility called SSD ToolBox. It might not have the funky GUI of some of its competitors' utilities but does have all the basics to help you maintain the drive including the ability to perform firmware updates, Secure Erase and data migration

We found the 2TB version of Netac's NV7000-t for £119.99 (inc VAT) on Amazon.co.uk HERE.

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Pros

• Very fast drive.
• Endurance.
• Pricing.

Cons

• Write speeds in some benchmark tests.

KitGuru says: Netac's NV7000-t performs very well and is the fastest Gen 4 drive we've seen to date in some of our testing, but as always for a Gen 4 drive it does run pretty hot when pushed hard so make sure it has some form of dedicated motherboard cooling or use the bundled heat spreader label at least. Netac has given it every chance with a pretty competitive price tag.

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