An Acer SSD is already quite unusual, but this one even more so: The Predator GM7, manufactured by the Chinese company BiWin, uses the still quite new MAP1602A PCIe 4.0 SSD controller from Maxio and TLC flash with 128 layers from the Chinese Yangtze Memory Technology Corporation (YMTC). It’s the first SSD with the Chinese memory that we can get our hands on – at least knowingly, because BiWin also makes SSDs for other manufacturers, including HP.
BiWin has not installed a DRAM cache on the SSD, but the SSD should be very fast with a maximum of 7.4 GB/s when reading and 6.7 GB/s when writing. The company also promises around 1 million IOPS when accessing random addresses. We had the opportunity to test one of the first SSDs.
First tests
We were almost able to achieve the data rates promised by BiWin in the test, and our measurements were even slightly higher when reading large files. We were also able to measure around 1 million IOPS when accessing random addresses. The speed of an SSD naturally drops when the SLC cache is full: After five minutes of writing, the speed of the Predator GM7 was just under 5.4 GB/s – still a good value.
The application benchmark PCMark 10 certifies the SSD values in the upper middle field, but it falls back a bit under constant load.
SSD controller
Not much is known about the SSD controller. It comes from the Chinese company Maxio, a spin-off of the chip manufacturer JMicron. It only uses four NAND channels; most fast PCIe 4.0 controllers distribute the data over eight channels on the flash memory. It already works with the current flash interface ONFI 5.0, which provides a speed of 2400 MT/s – even if the memory used does not allow this. The MAP1602A is one of the first controllers to support NVMe version 2.0; however, this has no advantages for use in notebooks or PCs.
BiWin is currently planning to build the SSD with 512 GB and 1 and 2 TB storage space. However, it is not yet known whether the SSD will ever appear on the German market. By doing without the DRAM chip, it should then be one of the cheaper, fast SSDs with PCIe 4.0.
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