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You may never have heard of them, but BIWIN, the Chinese OEM manufacturer of high-performance memory and storage solutions, have been around since 2010. Their latest range of SSDs, the X570 PRO, are the company's first Gen 5 drives, sitting under BWIN's Black Opal gaming division. The X570 PRO model lineup consists of three capacities, 1TB, 2TB and the flagship 4TB drive. We've already taken a look at the flagship drive HERE, but now it's the turn of the midrange drive, the 2TB X570 PRO.
The 2TB X570 PRO is officially rated as up to 14,000MB/s and 13,000MB/s for Sequential reads and writes respectively. That 14,000MB/s Sequential read rating is the same for all three drives in the lineup. The 4TB drive has the same up to 13,000MB/s write rating as the 2TB drive and the 1TB model gets a up to 10,500MB/s.
As for random performance, all three drives are rated as up to 1,600,000 IOPS for writes with the 2TB and 4TB drives having the same up to 2,000,000 IOPS figure for reads with the 1TB getting up to 1,600,000 IOPS.
The X570 PRO is a single-sided design with the controller being joined by two 232-layer NAND packages and a DRAM IC (in the case of the 2TB drive this is a 2GB chip).
At the heart of the X570 PRO is a controller we've never come across before from Silicon Motion, the SM2508. This controller promises the holy grail for Gen 5 SSDs – high end performance together with reduced power consumption. The SM2508 is the world’s first PCIe Gen5 client SSD controller using TSMC’s 6nm EUV process and its the 6nm process that holds the key to lower power consumption. Silicon Motion claim the controller offers a 50% reduction in power consumption compared to 12nm controllers, 7x better power efficiency than PCIe Gen4 SSDs and up to 70% better than current competitive PCIe Gen5 drives.The SM2508 uses quad-core ARM Cortex R8 CPU architecture supporting a flash interface running at up to 3600 MT/s. The X570 PRO has the controller combined with 232-layer 3D TLC NAND.
Using the default CrystalDiskMark 8 tests we could not only confirm the official up to 14,000MB/s and 13,000MB/s Sequential read/write maximum figures but we got a little more out of the drive with test results of 14,283MB/s for reads and 13,227MB/s for writes.
When it came to random performance, we couldn't get close to the official 2,000,000 IOPS maximum figure with our 4-threaded tests. The best random read figure we saw was 504,714 IOPS at QD16. The best write performance also came at QD16, 426,310 IOPS. Switching over to the default Peak Performance Profile in CrystalDiskMark 8, we still couldn't confirm the official maximums, but got a lot closer to them with a best read result of 1,898,871 IOPS with 1,528,129 IOPS for writes, both of which are faster than the 4TB drive we looked at.
To keep the X570 PRO cool, the drive uses a graphene thermal pad under the product label, which together with the 6nm design of the controller works well. The hottest the drive got while under testing was 57° C when it was being pushed hard.
We found the 2TB version of the Biwin Black Opal X570 PRO on Amazon for £239.99 (inc VAT) HERE but until the 7th of March, there is a £15 discount voucher available for the 2TB drive.
Pros
- Sequential speeds.
- Overall performance.
- Endurance.
Cons
- Write speeds in some benchmark tests.
Kitguru says We thought the 4TB Biwin Black Opal X570 PRO was rather good, but in some of our tests the 2TB version was even faster. Using a combination of the latest controller from Silicon Motion and a graphene thermal pad, it doesn't need the massive heatsink so often seen on high performance Gen 5 drives.
