Fifth Generation Supernova GIGABYTE AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB Unboxing Test

AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB is the first new-generation PCIe Gen5 x4 SSD product with sequential read/write performance of 10,000, 9,500 MB/s. It utilizes the 12nm Phison PS5026-E26 main controller chip that supports eight NAND flash channels, 32 CEs, LPDDR4 4GB of cache and the new NVMe 2.0 protocol. Supporting eight NAND flash channels, 32 CEs, LPDDR4 4GB cache, and the new NVMe 2.0 protocol, the AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB delivers the read/write performance of the previous-generation PCIe Gen4.0 x4 37%.

AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB Specification:
Interface: PCI-Express 5.0 x4
NVMe: 2.0
Interface format: M.2 2280
Sequential read speed: 10000 MB/s
Sequential Write Speed: 9500 MB/s
Capacity: 2TB
Controller: Phison PS5026-E26-52
NAND Flash: 3D TLC NAND Flash
Cache: LPDDR4 4GB
Size: 92 x 23.5 x 44.7 mm (with heat sink) / 80 x 22 x 2.3 mm (without heat sink)
Warranty: 5-year limited warranty
Durability: 1400 TBW

New Generation Pioneer AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB Unboxing

GIGABYTE launched the first Gen5 preview at the end of PCIe Gen4 SSDs, and at that time, it boasted that the maximum sequential read/write performance of the new generation PCIe Gen5 NVME SSDs would reach 12000 MB/s. However, later on, manufacturers including GIGABYTE also supplemented their previews by saying that the read performance of the first wave of mass-produced PCIe Gen5 SSDs would only be around 10000 MB/s at the most. However, manufacturers including GIGABYTE also added that the read performance of the first wave of mass-produced PCIe Gen5 SSD products would be around 10,000 MB/s.

The main reason is that the production capacity and quantity of 232-Layer 3D NAND Flash chips that can keep up with the performance of the controllers cannot keep up with the production capacity and quantity of 232-Layer 3D NAND Flash chips that can keep up with the performance of the controllers. The first tier of PCIe Gen 5 SSDs that are on the market are almost all using Qunlian Phison's PS5026-E26 controllers. The E26 provides eight NAND channels and supports up to 2400 MT/s NAND speeds. Phison's official specification for the host controller is 13 GB/s write and 12 GB/s read speeds, with up to 1.5 million random read IOPS and 2 million random write IOPS.

Currently, the 176-layer 3D NAND Flash cell speed limit cannot exceed 10GBps, while Gigabyte uses Micron's 232-layer 3D NAND, which can increase the performance to 12.4GB/s. However, production is not yet sufficient, so brands are still slowly introducing products with performance up to 12GB/s. Currently, more choices of PCIe Gen 5 SSD products mainly focus on 10 GB/s. PCIe Gen 5 SSDs are still mainly focused on 10 GB/s.

∆ Version 2 of the AORUS Gen5 12000 SSD Showcase.

The ∆AORUS Gen5 12000 SSD has a new level of read/write performance, but it is not yet in mass production or available for sale.

This is an unboxing test of GIGABYTE's first version of the AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB, which is equipped with the Phison E26 PCIe 5.0×4 controller and uses Micron's 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory, providing up to 10,000 and 9,500MB/s of sequential read/write performance respectively, and comes with a dual heatpipes. M.2 Thermal Guard XTREME heatsinks provide ample cooling performance.

The Warranty section offers a 1400 TBW Write Volume and a 5-year Limited Warranty, which is based on the formula that a user would need to write over 767 GB per day for 5 years in order to exceed the 1400 TBW of total data bits written in 5 years.

∆ AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB.

∆ Sponge protects the inner layer.

The AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB comes with a pre-patched thermal conductor, which is made of copper-like material to ensure sufficient thermal conductivity. The author does not recommend removing the copper foil thermal conductor for use, as the copper material itself has good heat dissipation performance, and can be used directly with the motherboard or the M.2 Thermal Guard XTREME heatsink. It can be used directly with motherboards or M.2 Thermal Guard XTREME heatsinks, and the removal process can cause irreversible deformation problems.

∆ Not shown in mint condition, the copper foil heat sink on the SSD has good heat dissipation properties.

The AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB utilizes the Groupon Phison PS5026-E26-52 SoC, which is based on the 12nm process and Arm Cortex-R5 processor solution. The SoC provides eight NAND channels capable of supporting up to 2400 MT/s NAND flash speeds. Flash speed.

The cache uses a single Hynix SK hynix LPDDR4 4GB (H9HCNNNNCPUML), and the storage cells are in the form of a double-sided setup, configured with four Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND Flash (2RC2DNV066) storage cells with a total storage capacity of 2TB, so gamers should remember to purchase when installing heat sinks. For products with thermal pads on the bottom, please remember to remove the protective film to maximize thermal performance.

∆Unicom Phison PS5026-E26-52 Host Controller Chip Program.

∆ Hynix SK hynix LPDDR4 4GB cache, Micron Micron 232 layer 3D TLC NAND Flash.

∆ Double-sided particle setting.

The M.2 Thermal Guard XTREME consists of dual heatpipes and cooling fins with a nano carbon coating to increase the cooling effect. The heatpipes and cooling fins are coated with a volcanic rock-like surface, and the height of the heatpipes and cooling fins has been increased to 44.7 mm high and 92 mm long, which is used to suppress AORUS Gen5 10000 SSDs that consume <11W of power, but the high profile is not too friendly to air-cooled towers. However, its tall size is not too friendly to air-cooled towers, and an all-in-one water-cooled installation would be more suitable.

∆ M.2 Thermal Guard XTREME compatible with dual-sided particle SSD installation.

∆ No additional RGB lighting effects.

∆ Dual heat pipes, stacked cooling fins, nano carbon coating.

AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB Performance tested, must have for new gen platforms!

In order to experience the latest specification of AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD, you must use Z790, Z690, X670/E, B650/E motherboards to enjoy the high-speed read/write performance brought by the full PCIe Gen 5 x4 bandwidth, and the test platform this time is using the Intel i9 12900K processor with the previously unboxed GIGABYTE This test platform uses an Intel i9 12900K processor with a previously unboxed GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS MASTER motherboard and an AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB installed in the first slot of the motherboard in the M2C_CPU mounting position, with the full PCIe Gen 5 x4 bandwidth provided by the processor's direct channel for the actual test.

Registered with a five-year warranty, the GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS MASTER motherboard is equipped with a 20+1+2-phase 105A Power Stage, which is easily capable of powering Intel's 12th/13th generation i9 processors, and includes many of the latest expansions such as DDR5, PCIe 5.0 x16, PCIe Gen5 x4 M.2 slots, and more. Gen5 x4 M.2 slot, etc. For the PCIe Gen 5 SSDs with higher heat generation, there are also double-sided thermal pads and heavy Thermal Guard III SSD heat sinks to cope with the situation, and the pre-installed Thermal Guard III SSD heat sinks are used directly on the motherboard for the test.

Testing Platform
Processor: Intel Core i9 12900K
Cooler: darkFlash TWISTER DX 360 Ver2.6
Motherboard: GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS MASTER
Memory: Kingston FURY Renegade RGB 6000 MT/s 16GBx2
Graphics: GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GAMING OC 8G
Operating System: Windows 11 Professional 21H2
Test Drive: GIGABYTE AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB (formatted empty)
System Drive: WD BLUE 3D NAND SATA M.2 2280 SSD 500GB
Gaming Disk: Intel 670P 2TB M.2 2280 PCIe SSD (Solidigm)
Power Supply: MONTECH TITAN GOLD 1200W
Case: STREACOM BC1 Benchtable V2
Graphics driver: GeForce Game Ready 532.03

The first step is to use CrystalDiskInfo software to view the basic information of the AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB, which utilizes PCIe 5.0 x4 transfer mode and NVM Express 2.0 standard, with support for S.M.A.R.T., TRIM, and VolatileWriteCache, and is capable of running at 40°C with the Thermal Guard III SSD heatsink included on the motherboard. Standby temperature is 40°C with the Thermal Guard III SSD heatsink included on the motherboard.

The new NVM Express (NVMe) 2.0 family of specifications will include new features such as ZNS partitioned namespaces, the KV instruction set, and support for a variety of underlying transport protocols that are common to both NVMe and NVMe-over-Fabric (NVMe-of) technologies, and the new protocols will also include mechanical hard disk drives, which may replace the SATA protocol in the future.

∆ CrystalDiskInfo software to view basic data, standby temperature 40°C.

The read/write performance of the AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB was tested using CrystalDiskMark software on an empty disk, with the test file size set to 1GiB in default mode, and the read/write speeds were 100054.94 MB/s and 10183.28 MB/s. The test file size was set to 1GiB and the read/write speeds were 100054.94 MB/s and 10183.28 MB/s, respectively.

The Q8T1 test result in the first column represents a thread with eight queue depths, which means that there are eight 1MB-sized accesses in the worklist waiting to be accessed. This corresponds to a real situation, such as reading or writing eight 1MB files from or to a hard disk at the same time, which is generally less likely to be done in general.

∆ CrystalDiskMark default mode 1GiB profile test result.

∆The temperature was 63°C after one round of CrystalDiskMark default mode 1GiB profile testing.

For daily use or for gamers, the QD1 to QD4 range is a good reference. If we switch the CrystalDiskMark profile to real-world performance, the first column will be Q1T1. Although the result will be a bit lower than the Q8T1, it will be more in line with the actual performance of the daily use experience.

The reason for this is that most of the daily operating systems use the Q1T1, which is a queue-depth mode with one thread, so the Q1T1 is more in line with daily use than the Q8T1. The read/write speeds of the Q1T1 are 8413.54 MB/s and 9489.45 MB/s with the test file size set to 1GiB in the Q1T1 mode.

∆ CrystalDiskMark Real World Mode 1GiB profile test results.

ATTO Disk Benchmark was used to test the sequential read/write performance and stability of different file sizes, and the maximum values of AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB were 9.55 GB/s for write and 9.39 GB/s for read.

∆ ATTO Disk Benchmark.

The performance of writing and reading professional video multimedia files was tested using the AJA System Test to simulate the scenarios. The settings were set to 5120×2700 5K RED format 64GB and 1GB files, and the final scores were 8887 MB/s writing and 8127 MB/s reading for 1GB, and 8982 MB/s writing and 8134 MB/s reading for the 64GB mode. The 64GB mode is 8982 MB/s written and 8134 MB/s read.

∆ AJA System Test 1GB.

∆ AJA System Test 64GB.

TxBENCH is now tested in the default test file 512MB mode, and the results of Read 9423.483 MB/s and Write 9601.589 MB/s are obtained.

∆ TxBENCH Default test file 512MB mode results.

The 3DMark Storage Benchmark test uses game startup loading, game file copying, game archiving, game installation, and OBS game recording for testing. The scenarios mainly use a number of games to conduct actual tests, so that gamers can clearly refer to the performance of the hard disk in terms of gaming usage. The higher the storage benchmark score, the better.

∆ 3DMark Storage Benchmark Test.

Finally, AIDA64 was used to conduct the Read Test Suite, Linear Read, and Linear Write tests. The Read Test Suite mainly uses Linear Read, Random Read, and Buffered Read to test the read performance of the hard disk through these three read methods.

∆ AIDA64 Read Test Suite reads the performance combination test.

AIDA64's Linear Read and Linear Write full disk read/write tests will read/write the hard disk's MAX capacity large files for users to observe its read/write stability. In the Linear Read test, the hard disk stays stable at an average of 7422.1 MB/s, while in the Linear Write test, the average write speed will drop to a minimum of 954.9 MB/s after the 33-35% cache is exhausted. In the Linear Write test, when the AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB cache is exhausted, the write speed drops to a minimum of 954.9 MB/s; the overall write average is 4504.1 MB/s, which means that unless users write large files of over 660 GB at one time, they can enjoy the high-speed performance of reading and writing at a sequential speed of 9500 MB/s.

∆ AIDA64 Linear Read.

∆ AIDA64 Linear Write.

Conclusion

The first mass-produced PCIe Gen 5 NVME SSD product in the market is the AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB from GIGABYTE. Although the product has been on the market for quite some time, I have been looking forward to it since the preview period (but now it's my turn to play with it), and in the CrystalDiskInfo Q8T1, the performance is actually The CrystalDiskInfo Q8T1 does achieve the labeled 10000 MB/s and 9500 MB/s sequential read/write performance.

However, as mentioned earlier, 232-Layer NAND flash capacity that can perfectly reach 2400 MTps is not yet available to vendors, so the vast majority of PCIe Gen 5 NVME SSDs are still focusing on 10,000 MB/s read performance at this stage.

The first version of PCIe Gen 5 NVME SSDs (10,000 MB/s) is quite sufficient and even a bit overpowered for the average consumer and daily user, and the second version of PCIe Gen 5 NVME SSDs (12,000 MB/s) is just around the corner.

As a pioneer, the AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB performance and stability is really good, in addition to the aforementioned sequential read/write performance, it also provides 1400 TBW and a five-year limited warranty, if you want to exhaust the 1400 TBW of data written to the total number of bits in five years, it's impossible to do so unless you write more than 767 GB every day for five years, which is unlikely to be achieved by daily desktop games and professional multi-media workers. It's unlikely that daily paperwork, games, and professional media workers will be able to achieve this amount of writing.

The Thermal Guard III SSD heatsink on the Z790 AORUS MASTER motherboard was installed throughout the testing process, and it was able to stabilize without heating up the hard drive to cause errors, perhaps because the AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD is still the first version of the PCIe Gen 5 NVME SSD product, and in the future, the heat generation of the product with stronger read/write performance will be a bit higher, but we'll have to wait and see what happens when it hits the market. In the future, products with stronger sequential read/write performance may have higher heat generation, but we'll have to wait and see what happens after it hits the market. If you want to get the best working temperature, you can also install the M.2 Thermal Guard XTREME heatsink that comes with the AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD 2TB, but its large body will be even more demanding on your PC's configuration.