Gigabyte announces heatsink-less Aorus Gen4 SSD SSD series

Gigabyte has announced the impending release of variants of its Aorus Gen4 SSD SSD series and they have something rather distinctive about them: no heatsinks.

Previously, the Aorus NVMe Gen4 SSD series offered rather large copper heatsinks. Now, a year later? A simple thin copper peel has been applied, working as a heat spreader. The thinking, it seems, is to allow people to use the M.2 heatsink that came with their motherboards. It also means you can very clearly see the Aorus logo if that's your kind of thing. 

The Aorus Gen4 SSD SSD series is available in three variants and they're pretty much the same as the previous drive. Each SSD uses a Phison PS5016-E16 controller with 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory over 8 channels. The three variants include 500GB, 1TB and 2TB models. Transfer speeds are 5,000MB/second for sequential read, 4,400MB/second for write (up to 2,500MB/second for the 500GB variant), 750,000 IOPS for random read, and a write IOPS of 700,000 (400,000/550,000 for the 500GB). 

The estimated write endurance changes depending on the size with the 2TB coming in at 3,600TBW, 1TB is 1,800TBW and 500GB is 850TBW. The MTBFP is 1.77 million hours with a 5-year product warranty alongside that too.

As before, Gigabyte boasts of the technology meaning the SSD is nearly twice as fast as a generic SSD (no insight on what counts as a 'general' SSD) with an up to 40 percent improvement on sequential read speeds compared to a 'normal' PCIe 3.0 SSD. Gigabyte also bundles in its SSD Tool Box software which provides insight into the health of the SSD at all times along with temperature details, and the ability to securely erase everything. 

For now, there's no word on price just yet but expect that to change in the near future once the Aorus Gen4 SSD SSD series becomes more widely available worldwide. If you're in the market for a new high-end SSD, this could be a decent bet but obviously we'll know more about that once a price has been officially announced.