Gigabyte has revealed the specifications of its new Aorus Gen5 10000 SSDs in 1TB and 2TB PCIe 5.0. And each of these SSDs comes with a large M.2 Thermal Guard XTREME heatsink. The problem with this cooling system is its size. It has proven to be incompatible with many motherboards even from Gigabyte.
Gigabyte announced the Aorus Gen5 10000 back in August 2022. In the announcement, the manufacturer shared a screenshot of CrystalDiskMark software. According to this screenshot, the SSD was delivering sequential read speeds of almost 12500 Mbytes/s and sequential write speeds of around 10000 Mbytes/s. However, it turns out that the final version of the drives doesn't support such speeds. For instance, the 2TB model only offers sequential read speeds of up to 10,000 Mbytes/s and write speeds of up to 9,500 Mbytes/s, while the 1TB model offers read speeds of up to 9,500 Mbytes/s and write speeds of up to 8,500 Mbytes/s.
The new SSDs are based on Micron's 232-layer Micron 3D TLC NAND flash memory chips and the Phison E26 NVMe 2.0 protocol-enabled controller. The 1TB model has 2GB of LPDDR4 cache memory and the 2TB model has 4GB of cache memory. Gigabyte claims up to 1.6 million hours of uptime. The 1TB model offers a 700 TBW (terabyte of rewritten data) endurance, while the 2TB model offers a 1,400 TBW endurance. What's more, the drives draw under 11W of power under load.
In addition, Gigabyte recommends the M.2 Thermal Guard XTREME heatsink for these drives to help prevent trotting. With this heatsink, the SSD's operating temperature is about 60 oC. However, this heatsink is not compatible with many motherboards, including Gigabyte itself. Therefore, the company has published a list of its board models with which this cooling system is incompatible. For example, owners of Mini-ITX form factor board models for AMD and Intel processors from Gigabyte and Aorus will not be able to use the Aorus Gen5 10000 HDD cooling system.
As for the Z790 Aorus Xtreme, Z790 Aorus Master, Z790 Aero G, X670E Aorus Xtreme and X670E Aorus Master, the company has recommended them for use with the specified drive cooling system.
But that's not all. Gigabyte also recommends using a CPU SSD for maximum passive SSD cooling efficiency to increase the space available for installing the drive. The company has not yet announced pricing for the new Aorus Gen5 10000 PCIe 5.0 SSD.
