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It had to happen sooner or later. I think we are the first to post such. A DRAMless Gen5 SSD that reaches 14GB/s, over 2 million IOPS and stands right beside Gen5 DRAM based SSDs. This is possible thorough BIWIN and the newest release of the Maxiotek MAP1806a 8-channel DRAMless NVMe SSD controller which you will probably be hearing much of in the near future. There is a bit of bad news that accompanies this which is that this is not a North American available SSD, at least not as of yet. The BIWIN X570 Black Opal will be available in Europe and Asia sooner than later.
So how did we get our hands on a brand new retail package of the X570? The right place at the right time and this was total unexpected during our Computex briefing with BIWIN just a few short days back. If you are in North America, watch Patriot USA releases closely in the next bit as they had a very similar SSD, the Viper Gaming PV563, on display at Computex as well. Same controller and the memory might be similar Micron based memory as well.
The BIWIN X570 is a PCIe 5.0 (Gen5) M.2 form factor 2280 (22mm wide x 80mm long) SSD that uses the latest NVMe 2.0 (Non-Volatile Memory Express) SSD protocol. It will be available in 1,2 and 4TB capacities and performance is listed at 14.5GB/s read and 11GB/s write for the 4TB, 14.5GB/s read and 10GB/s write for the 2TB and 14GB/s read and 7.8GB/s write for the 1TB version. Listed specs describe up to 3.5 million IOPS at low 4k random, however, we wonder if this is an error as we never came close and haven’t seen IOPS anywhere near this in a M.2 SSD historically.
The X570 Black Opal contains the Maxiotek MAP 1806a 8-channel – 4CE DRAMless Gen5 NVMe SSD controller which is built on the TSMC 6nm process. This controller can run as high as 3600MT/s and can support up to 16TB in NAND memory. the PCB has four pieces of Micron 232-layer 3D TLC B58R Fortis NAND flash memory. This is a single sided SSD and the combination of this, the smaller footprint controller and the lack of a DRAM cache chip should assist in this being a relatively cool SSD.
We can tell this is an early release sample by the serial number on the branding sticker above. This SSD will come with a 5-year limited warranty and is rated for 600TBW (terabytes written) per 1TB of capacity. As mentioned earlier, the X570 Black Opal may be restricted to European and Asian sales initially so we do not have a listed MSRP. Fortunately, if you check Amazon, it will automatically default to your country of purchase to assist with those countries. WSe have no doubt the BIWIN brand name will reach Amazon North America soon enough.
I seem to remember that DRAMLESS SSDs gets significantly slower once filled over 50%. Did you notice anything like that?
This theory is not restricted to DRAMless SSDs and not current. Explaining in the most basic of terms, it relates to how information is saved and deleted from pages and blocks as the SSD fills past, for the most part, the 80% mark. Overprovisioning and Garbage Collection which is present in all SSDs counters this. We discuss that in detail in our Beginners article, Trim and Garbage Collection. I would invite you to return with a link if you have found something other than this. We have not, and don’t find it necessary to fill a drive in order to dedtermine if it slows which, actually also brings up another thought which is present in all SSDs, steady state transfer. All SSDs will slow to a certain speed for large transfers; this is inevidable. It is not the result of the drive being half full, and is not restricted to DRAMless SSDs.
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