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The Innogrit Ranier Gen4 NVMe SSD controller has met with much success since the company officially came out of stealth mode. The success of this controller is testament to the experience within the company. Their management team is led by their CEO Dr. Zining Wu who served as Chief Technology Officer before leaving Marvell, most of his Management Team following behind. At the TSSDR, we have reported on this controllers first release in the XPG GAMMIX S70, followed by the coolest SSD on the market today, the XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade, but the top performing example of this controllers implementation to date is by far within our KIOXIA owned Plextor M10P NVMe SSD Review.
Today is a new day and hot off our bench after a few weeks of putting it through its paces, we have the newest ‘Ranier controlled’ Predator GM7000 2TB Gen4 NVMe SSD. Checking online, you can find a brand spanking new website, called Predator Storage that describes Predator’s new products, but nowhere in sight will one find that this new product appears to be a collaboration between Acer and BIWIN, unless of course you take a magnifying glass to the exterior packaging itself. Exterior packaging is even a bit unique as there is a hologram branding on the right side with a number… that we still can’t determine the purpose of.
The Predator GM7000 is available in capacities of 512GB, 1TB and 2TB with the possibility of 4TB to be added in the future. This SSD is a PCIe 4.0 x4 (four-lane) M.2 2280 (80mm) form-factor NVMe SSD that uses the NVMe 1.4 protocol. Performance is listed at 7400MB/s read and 6700MB/s write with 700K read and write IOPS for the 2TB version we are testing today, all of which drops slightly at the lower capacities.
The sample we received contains a black PCB (printed circuit board) with a rather unusual padded foam material covering the top components. We say unusual as we have formed the opinion that this foam padding actually prevents the dissipation of heat from the components as one typically sees through thermal heat dissipation.
We are open to return or clarification from the company with respect to this but, in our testing, we had to remove this and use a typical ‘aluminum block’ heatsink for test purposes. This still confuses us and we wonder if this was a thought towards incorporation of this SSD into PS5 gaming systems.
The Predator GM7000 contains four pieces of Micron 96-Layer TLC NAND flash memory, two on each side, the Innogrit ‘Ranier’ IG5236 12nm 8-channel NVMe SSD controller, as well as two 1GB pieces of NANYA DDR4-2666 DRAM cache buffer.
This SSD comes with a limited 5-year warranty, with up to 1200TBW (Terabytes Written), has AES encryption with end-to-end data protection, along with 4K LDPC Error Correction (ECC). Predator also provides free Acronis software in order to properly migrate to the new Predator SSD.
Checking Amazon, we can see GM7000 availability at 512GB ($89.99) and 1TB ($149.99) which is a good start at MSRP for the 1TB version is higher at $179.99 and the 2TB version is $349.99.