PCHardCores: No, this isn’t a graphics card – it’s the world’s fastest consumer SSD

Monday, 5 July 2021

No, this isn’t a graphics card – it’s the world’s fastest consumer SSD

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You’d be forgiven for mistaking Gigabyte’s Aorus Xtreme Gen 4 for a graphics card at first glance – albeit a very slim one – but this is actually an SSD, and an incredibly fast offering at that.

The Aorus Xtreme Gen 4 can achieve up to a blistering 28GB/s when it comes to sequential read speeds, or 26.6GB/s with writes, and with capacities running to 32TB, as you might guess, this is a seriously high-end SSD product aimed at workstations rather than a run-of-the-mill PC.

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The Aorus Xtreme is actually a bunch of 4TB Aorus Gen4 7000s M.2 SSDs, up to eight of them, on a card complete with Phison PS5018-E18 controllers, and this raft of solid-state drives can be configured in RAID to reach that potential top read speed of 28GB/s.

Dual fans

That GPU-esque look comes from the twin fans which are on top to keep the Aorus Xtreme out of any danger of overheating, along with an expansive aluminum heatsink plus a whole raft of temperature sensors – 10 of them – to make sure the unit is keeping suitably cool. There are three fan operation modes, so things can stay nice and quiet if the drive isn’t being taxed and is just ticking along.

This is a PCIe 4.0 drive, of course – or rather a pile of them – and so obviously a compatible system is needed in that respect, with plenty of PCIe lanes to hand, and a beefy CPU. But as we’ve already mentioned, this product is designed for heavyweight workstation PCs, not your average consumer machine.

Still, it’s always interesting to see just how fast things can go in terms of storage these days, even if most consumers don’t have the kind of PC required to run a drive like this – or a wallet deep enough to afford it, of course.

While Gigabyte hasn’t announced any pricing for the Aorus Xtreme Gen 4 yet, the price tag of the 2TB Aorus Gen4 7000s falls just shy of $400, and remember, if you’re loading up eight of these at double the capacity (4TB)… well, that’s going to get very expensive, very quickly.