News Aorus’ New PCIe 4 SSD Gobbles Up 16 Lanes of PCIe, Might Make Your GPU Jealous

[Admin]

The Aorus Gen4 AIC SSD 8TB is a PCIe add-in-card that houses four 2TB PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSDs.

Aorus’ New PCIe 4 SSD Gobbles Up 16 Lanes of PCIe, Might Make Your GPU Jealous : Read more

 

[alextheblue]

The Ryzen 3000 CPUs have 24 PCIe lanes – four of which are downstream to the chipset. Consequently, from the 20 lanes left, you’d eat up 16 with the Aorus SSD. That leaves only 4 lanes

That depends on the motherboard. They could split that up a number of ways, even tossing in a switch. With that being said I personally think if you're going to drop this much money on your storage alone, you should probably strongly consider an HEDT platform. This would pair well with the next-gen TR boards and processors.

 

[nitrium]

"This all sounds good, but is there is a caveat. As noted, the Aorus Gen4 AIC SSD 8TB runs on PCIe 4.0. So the only platform you can currently use this with is an an AMD X570 motherboard paired with an AMD Ryzen 3000 CPU."

Wait, shouldn't it be backward compatible with older PCIe slots (in fact, doesn't it have to be in order to comply with the PCIe standard)? I know with GPU's you can run PCIe 3.0 boards in PCIe 2.0 and 1.1 slots with no problems. Sure you don't get the max throughput, but it should still work, right?

 

[Darkbreeze]

The unit is rated at 430,000 random read IOPS and 440,000 random write IOPS.

Which means, unless those are QD1 IOPS, it's SLOWER than a 970 EVO Plus, which has 600,000 and 550,000 IOPS. And I seriously doubt those are QD1 IOPS. Since random read and write performance is where nearly all drives "live", this drive is actually slower than just using a standard PCIe 3.0 NVME drive.

 

[remosito]

Which means, unless those are QD1 IOPS, it's SLOWER than a 970 EVO Plus, which has 600,000 and 550,000 IOPS. And I seriously doubt those are QD1 IOPS. Since random read and write performance is where nearly all drives "live", this drive is actually slower than just using a standard PCIe 3.0 NVME drive.

Bingo!

 

[gfg]

I think that for the price of this ssd, it is for users of threadripper 3000, that although it is not yet on the market, I have no doubts about the price of this ssd.

 

[Slesreth]

Which means, unless those are QD1 IOPS, it's SLOWER than a 970 EVO Plus, which has 600,000 and 550,000 IOPS. And I seriously doubt those are QD1 IOPS. Since random read and write performance is where nearly all drives "live", this drive is actually slower than just using a standard PCIe 3.0 NVME drive.

Where Niels Broekhuijsen got his IOPS information from is not provided in any link given in this article. The press release page linked from the article does not even use IOPS or the words that make it. The only numbers given for speed is in this quote from the first paragraph, "..., today launched the AORUS Gen4 AIC SSD 8TB with ultra-fast 15,000MB/s sequential read/write speeds." [sic]

For further reference I give the actual item specification page at gigabyte.com.
Which does not list this information either. At this point in time the actual IOPS of this drive appears to be pure speculation.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Given that it's 4 x 2TB drives, I wonder if this drive is implemented similarly to a 4-way RAID0 internally? That would explain the lackluster random performance and high sequential performance.

Assuming the IOPS numbers in this article are accurate.

 

[kinggremlin]

Given that it's 4 x 2TB drives, I wonder if this drive is implemented similarly to a 4-way RAID0 internally? That would explain the lackluster random performance and high sequential performance.

Assuming the IOPS numbers in this article are accurate.

Yes, it requires RAID to hit max throughput.

https://www.gigabyte.com/Solid-State-Drive/AORUS-Gen4-AIC-Adaptor

"test conditions are under PCIe 4.0 x16 slots, Windows 10 OS, AHCI mode, running instant RAID through the AORUS Storage Manager. "

 

[Bamda]

Aorus Gen4 AIC SSD 8TB is perfectly matched for the new AMD Threadripper 3960X and 3970X with the additional lanes that CPUs provide.