ACER FA100 1TB PCIe Gen3 x4 M.2 SSD Review

A Closer Look

It’s a humble-looking drive, pretty much like all M.2 drives, really. As you can see, it’s mostly naked, with just a sticker on the top rather than a heatsink. However, this is a more affordable drive, and that’s no doubt partly why. Personally, with most motherboards having M.2 heatsinks of their own, it’s money I’m happy to save.

The drive measures in at just 80mm long, so really, it’s going to be broadly compatible with most motherboards and laptops, as few have M.2 ports smaller than this.

As I said, it’s the PCIe Gen3 interface, so you’re going to get pretty decent performance here. Of course, if your motherboard supports Gen4, this drive will still work, but you’ll still be limited to the speeds the drive is capable of.

It uses a single-side PCB design, so while there is an ACER sticker on the back, it’s not really covering up anything.

As you can see, there are four 256MB NAND chips here, giving us 1TB total. They’re BIWIN branded, 64-layer 3D TLC.

The controller is the Innogrit IG5216, which features the NVMe 1.4 spec.