This drive is rated with a max sequential speed of up to 7200 MB/s read and 6200 MB/s write, and it’s extremely close to that on the read and actually exceeded that on the write speeds, which is obviously fantastic.
We also see very high IOPS, delivering performance that’s actually on par with the more premium BiWin Black Opal drive we reviewed recently.
This is a DRAM-less drive, which does keep cost down, but also keep in mind that it is built to be a less extreme drive compared to say, their Black Opal series, and we can see this a little in the write speeds, which are fast here, but a little bit inconsistent but all still comfortably in the mid 5Gbps region. The write speeds are consistent here at higher block sizes, though, scoring around 6.61 GB/s throughout.
For a quality Gen4 drive, we want to see a score above 24000 in Anvil, and at 25006 it’s certainly there. More importantly, we can see very 0.1ms or less response times throughout the testing, with strong IOPs in all tests too.
Moving lots of tiny files totalling 64MB, file transfers are virtually instant, clocking in at just 357ms, which is going to speed up daily workflows.
However, even for larger file copy processes, moving 6 files totalling 50GB took just 18 seconds, so again, every fast, and that’s going to make dealing with larger work files a breeze.
Responsiveness is excellent, with very fast access times for both reading and writing, and if you’re upgrading from Gen3 or traditional SATA drives and SSDs, you’re really going to feel the increased responsiveness.
While the drive is rated for up to 1000K IOPS, we didn’t see that in our testing as that’s a theoretical max in one specific workflow, but we still got around 8000K in write IOPS at 4K-64Thrd, which is certainly on the high-end for Gen4 drives.
For daily use of loading programs, games, and assets, the drive continued to respond quickly throughout all our testing.
When dealing with compressible data, the drive performed excellently, and while there was a dip at 30%, the drive seems to handle 0% (uncompressible) and 100% compressible data equally well.
For capturing uncompressed 5K 10-bit video, the drive excels, handling the massive read and write demands of video capture with ease.
When it comes to Final Fantasy XVI, anything around 10 seconds is regarded as truly excellent, and shows us that this drive will be fantastic for gamers, resulting in short loading times in games with large assets such as Final Fantasy, Call of Duty, and well, any game really.
Throughout this demanding benchmark run, the drive was stressed many times, and yet it still never exceeded 47c. With that in mind, it’s unlikely to ever suffer from any thermal throttling issues.
