Gigabyte has announced an outstandingly durable drive marketed for AI. This M.2 SSD series is said to have more than a hundred times the write durability of regular desktop drives at an equivalent capacity.
Gigabyte seems to have the future in mind as it unleashes one of the highest-durability drives ever, putting the best SSDs to shame. Available in 1TB and 2TB capacities using unknown 3D NAND flash, the AI TOP 100E SSD series operates on a Gen 4 M.2 interface, pushing up to 7,200MB/s sequential read speeds and 6,500MB/s write speeds. These also come equipped with 1GB and 2GB of LPDDR4 RAM as a cache to improve and maintain consistent performance during intense loads.
As its name implies, this product series is designed for AI workloads, especially ones that write large amounts of data. In this regard, Gigabyte somehow managed to boost the total write capacity to a whopping 109,500TBW on the 1TB model and 219,000TBW on the 2TB. The company also claims 1.6 million hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), complemented by a five-year warranty.
For reference, Gigabyte’s super-fast 2TB Aorus Gen5 14000 is only rated for 1,400TBW. In other words, this new series boasts 156 times more durability at equivalent capacity. Even if you try to break it by writing into it at full speed nonstop, you will need at least a year to reach its rated durability. In fact, it’ll likely become obsolete before a regular user can squeeze all its worth.
While Gigabyte didn’t explain how it achieved such lofty heights, seeing the maximum capacity on offer, it may as well be using MLC (2 bits per cell), though probably not SLC or QLC. The reason is that the former’s density is too low, whereas the latter’s durability is the worst of the bunch. Either way, the AI TOP 100E series opens a new chapter in SSD storage, one that we like very much.