Gigabyte Aorus Gen 4 7000s SSD (Tech) Review

Gigabyte recently launched their Aorus Gen 4 7000s SSD and not only does it look gorgeous, it functions fantastically well too. In 2022, it’s almost a necessity to have a high-speed NVME available in your system either for your Operating System or for your games (or other programmes) that demand high speed read/write access. 

The Aorus Gen 4 7000s SSD is an NVME drive that is also fully PlayStation 5 compatible and can be used with the console to boost your storage while still delivering ridiculously fast data transfer speeds.

Before diving into the performance aspects of the drive, here are the technical specifications:

• Interface: PCI-Express 4.0 x4, NVMe 1.4
• Form Factor: M.2 2280
• Total Capacity: 1000GB
• NAND: 3D TLC NAND Flash
• External DDR Cache: DDR4 1GB
• Sequential Read speed: Up to 7000 MB/s
• Sequential Write speed: Up to 5500 MB/s
• Random Read IOPS: up to 350k
• Random Write IOPS: up to 700k
• Dimension: 80.5 x 11.25 x 23.5 mm
• Mean time between failure (MTBF): 1.6 million hours
• Power Consumption (Active): Average: R : 6.6W, W : 6.5W
• Power Consumption (Idle): <30mW
• Temperature (Operating): 0°C to 70°C
• Temperature (Storage): -40°C to 85°C
• Warranty: 1. Limited 5-years or 700TBW.
• 2. Limited warranty based on 5 years or 700TBW, whichever comes first. (*TBW is evaluated by JEDEC workload standard.) *TBW (Terabyte Written): Terabytes Written is the total amount of data that can be written into a SSD before it is likely to fail.
• 3. When the usage of an NVME SSD as indicated by the “Percentage Used” (SMART ID: 05) in SMART page of “GIGABYTE SSD toolbox” reaches 100 means out of warranty. (A new unused product will show the number of 0)

Starting off with the drive’s physical features, the Aorus 7000s SSD looks fantastic. The heatsink isn’t ridiculously over the top and instead features a sleek, stylish aluminium patterned sliced design with a nanocarbon coating. The heatsink itself is only 7mm high which keeps it relatively close to your motherboard and helps prevent it from getting in the way of other things that may be plugged in.

To benchmark this SSD, we used both a PlayStation 5 console and our test system (Gigabyte Z690 Gaming X Motherboard, Intel i5-12600k, Gigabyte P1000GM PSU, Aorus Waterforce 240 Cooler and 16gb HyperX 3200Mhz RAM). First up, the drive was installed into the PS5. 

This was a fairly straightforward process involving removing the PS5’s side panel, unscrewing a cover, installing the NVME into the slot, screwing it into place and replacing the cover and panel. PlayStation Support have a handy install guide video available on their YouTube channel which shows you how easy it is to install an M.2 NVME into your PS5 and we highly recommend viewing it before attempting to do this yourself. 

Once the drive is installed and the PS5 booted up, the console immediately asks you to format the M.2 NVME. This is a quick process and you’ll be able to start using the drive as additional storage immediately afterwards. 

To test the drive’s speeds we timed how long it takes to load into a level in Ghostrunner on PS5 from selecting continue on the main menu. With Ghostrunner installed on the default internal storage, it took around 8.68 seconds. After Ghostrunner was moved to the Aorus 7000s SSD and the same test performed, it took around 7.84 seconds. Given the miniscule difference in seconds along with user error from using a smartphone stopwatch, it’s safe to say that the Aorus 7000s SSD performs just as good, if not better, than the internal PS5 SSD when it comes to loading up a game. 

Benchmarking the drive on PC was a fairly straightforward exercise. Using CrystalDiskMark Shizuku Edition, we ran the Default benchmark, the NVME benchmark, the NVME Peak Performance benchmark and the NVME Real World Performance benchmark tests. The following results were obtained as follows.

Interpreting these results needs a bit of an introduction. First and foremost, read/write speeds can be affected greatly by temperatures. If you have an NVME drive running hot, it may thermal throttle. This is where Gigabyte’s Aorus 7000s’s heatsink comes into play and keeps the drive cool even when under load. CrystalDiskMark’s benchmark allows for repeated testing with short intervals in between hammering the drive with read/write workload. We set the benchmark to do 5 repeats and the values obtained didn’t decrease, which means that the NVME could clearly manage to keep itself cool thanks to the heatsink doing its job well. 

CrystalDiskInfo was used to monitor the NVME’s temperatures while being benchmarked and this never went up further than 43 degrees Celsius. In a real world scenario, chances are this will go up somewhat but the NVME was definitely more than capable of remaining cool under pressure. We tested this further by transferring around 50gb of data to the drive and it remained in the 41 degree Celsius region.

The IOPS or “Input/Output Operations Per Second” values obtained above in the Peak Performance benchmark were great and were on par with what we’d expect to see from a modern NVME drive. In fact, the benchmark values obtained were higher than what Gigabyte themselves state in the drive’s official tech specs and we’re extremely pleased to see this level of performance here. 

Lastly, we tested the load times in Monster Hunter Rise after installing it onto the NVME. Loading into the game from clicking on the save file took on average around 8.26 seconds. This is what we’d expect from a super fast NVME and it’s great to see it in action.

Overall, Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen 4 7000s NVME SSD is an amazing drive that we can highly recommend to users. Whether you’re using it in a PC or in your PS5, this drive delivers fantastic performance and has a hefty 5 year warranty (or 700TBW) for peace of mind. The price point might be a tad high but you’re getting an exceptionally good drive here.