AORUS RGB 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD Review

AORUS RGB 512GB

Today is quite an interesting day, as when it comes to storage reviews, I’m not the guy you call. Sure, I’m not completely clueless, I’m a PC enthusiast and I can power through the task in hand. I have reviewed dozens of PCs of the years after all; dozens! However, this isn’t a “normal” SSD review for us. The latest drive from AORUS will work with any motherboard. However, it’s specially designed to match up with their XTREME range, and I’m one of the few people in the country who actually has one. It’s the heart of our GPU test bench in fact; perfect!

Check out our review of the AORUs Master Z390 Motherboard here.

Features

The drive features the Phison controller, using the NVMe 1.3 interface. That means it’ll run on PCIe 3.0 x4, so pretty much any modern M.2 ready motherboard or PCIe expansion card will suffice. The model we have is M.2 2280, so it’s pretty compact, and with the heatsink, it’s just 8.1mm tall. It also comes paired with SSD Tool Box, a software suite to monitor temperature, data usage, Secure Erase, and much more. AORUS has always been proficient on the software side, and that remains true today.

Of course, it’s fully equipped with Gigabyte/AORUS RGB Fusion 2.0 tech too. If you love your customisation, it’ll certainly fit the bill in that regard.

Specifications

The memory on this model is 512GB, which comes courtesy of the Toshiba BiCS3 3D NAND TLC Flash chips. That promises around 360,000 IOPS/440,000 IOPS Max. Random 4K Read/Write. So, it’s no slouch then. Of course, how that stacks up in our own tests remains to be seen.

• Form Factor: M.2 2280
  
• Interface: PCI-Express 3.0 x4, NVMe 1.3
  
• Total Capacity: 512GB
  
• Warranty: Limited 5-years
  
• Sequential Read Speed: up to 3480 MB/s
  
• Sequential Write speed: up to 2000 MB/s
  
• TRIM & S.M.A.R.T supported
  
• AES 256 supported

For in-depth specifications and support, please visit the official product page here.

What AORUS Had to Say

“With the new NVMe interface controller, AORUS RGB M.2 SSD delivers blazing speed up to 3480MB/sec sequential read, and up to 2000MB/s sequential write. Furthermore, the heatsink keeps controller and memory temperatures low, ensuring that SSD performance won’t be compromised . This is particularly important to gamers since components heat up significantly during game play. Get ready to enter the next generation of computing, with faster and smoother in game streaming and graphic intensive rendering.” – AORUS