Zotac Sonix 480GB PCIe NVMe SSD Review

Final Thoughts

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Pricing

At the time of writing, the Zotac Sonix 480GB PCIe add-in SSD can be yours for $382.25 at NewEgg or £343.75 at Amazon UK.

Conclusion

The Sonix was quite an impressive drive to have here in the office and it continues the trend that Zotac set with their graphics cards: A great performance that goes past the norm.

The PCIe card in itself looks great with its silver finish. The air vents are strategically placed and aid the cooling of the card on top of the heat sink. The rear backplate adds to the design and doubles as a heatsink for half the NAND chips. Overall a clever design that makes the card as beautiful as useful in all scenarios, even tight systems that might be hotter. There should be no thermal throttling for this drive.

The performance was great too and we saw sequential figures all the way up to 2900MB/s reading and 2300MB/s writing. The random performance goes far beyond what we see from SATA3 drives too with figures around 285K IOPS reading and 255K IOPS writing.

The only small downside to the drive, right now, is that there aren’t any real Windows 10 drivers for it yet. It works with the default Microsoft ones, but you need to turn off the write-cache buffer flushing for the drive. That is however Phison that is late with that and not Zotac.

Overall, the Sonix performs awesome and delivers more than it promises. Whether you’re a gamer that want the lowest latencies and fastest loading times or you’re a creative professional that works with large resolution projects, the Sonix will do the job and it will do it well.

Pros

• Great performance
• Low profile bracket included
• Beautiful design
• Great heat-dissipate features
• High compatibility

Cons

• Price (although fair)
• No Phison Win10 drives yet

“The Zotac Sonix shows what NVMe is all about, blazing fast speeds, low access time, and plenty of capacity. And it does that looking gorgeous.”

Thank You, Zotac for providing us with this sample.