GIGABYTE Enters Storage Market With UD PRO SSDs
Gigabyte just let us know that they are entering the storage market with a line of Solid-State Drives that should be hitting retailers sometime next week. The new drives are called Gigabyte UD PRO SSDs and the series is currently made up of a 256GB and 512GB 2.5-inch SATA III internal drives. Gigabyte isn’t saying what controller is being used, but did point out that Toshiba BiCS3 3D TLC NAND. Toshiba BiCS3 NAND is the latest 64-layer memory architecture and is widely used by many drive markers. Sequential Read/Write performance on these two drives is up to 530/500 MB/s and the 4K Random Read/Write performance is up to 80k/75k. Gigabyte notes that the UD PRO series drives feature on-board DDR3L SDRAM cache, so this is not a DRAM-Less model.
The Gigabyte UD PRO series SSD is backed by a 3-year warranty and when it comes to endurance ratings you are looking at 100 TBW on the 256GB model and 200 TBW on the 512GB model. Gigabyte points out that the warranty will expire after 3 years or the drives TBW rating has been exceeded, whichever comes first. The Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) on this series is 1.8 million hours.
The MSRP on the Gigabyte UD Pro Series 256GB SSD is $68.99 and the 512GB model is priced at $119.99. That puts the price per GB at around $0.27 for the 256GB drive and at $0.23 for the 512GB model. The MSRP puts it lower than the Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB drive ($144.99), but higher than Crucial MX500 500GB ($114.99) and ADATA SU800 512GB ($109.99). So, Gigabyte has the MSRP right where we expected it to be and street pricing will likely be lower. Gigabyte could have a good performing drive here with decent pricing, so we can’t wait to get them in and do testing on them.
The Gigabyte UD PRO Series SSDs is clearly an entry-level product, but Gigabyte will be rolling out higher performing drives soon. Gigabyte informed Legit Reviews that they are working on M.2 PCIe NVMe and PCIe NVMe Add-in Card (AIC) AORUS drives for prosumers and enthusiasts. We expect to learn more about those at Computex 2018 that begins the first week of June.
Update 05/11/2018 @7pm CT: Gigabyte got back to us with out controller manufacturer inquirer and they believe that it is a Phison controller. They aren’t sure they exact model, but are still looking into it for us. Other sites are reporting that Gigabyte is using the Phison PS3110-S10 S10 controller. This controller has been around since 2014 as we first saw it used on the Corsair Neutron XT SSD series. It was later used on the Kingston HyperX Savage and Patriot Ignite series drives. We’ve seen it used with 2D MLC NAND Flash and now it’s being used with 3D TLC NAND Flash, so it looks like Phison developed a very robust controller all those years ago!