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It’s pretty rare that I might use the word perfection when it comes to SSDs. There is always somewhere that an SSD can be improved upon just a bit. Our report today is of an SSD that is not yet available in North America. It is the first available ‘international’ retail SSD with the newest Silicon Motion SM2508 controller and the number of people asking for release of such an SSD in North America is massive. It is the third SSD that we have reviewed with this brand new SMI 2508 Gen5 8-channel NVMe SSD controller, all three reports showing what can be done with different NAND flash memory. Introducing the Predator GM9000 Gen5 NVMe 2TB SSD.
The Predator GM9000 is licensed and manufactured by a company named BIWIN Storage Technology and, although many aren’t so familiar with BIWIN in North America, they have been around for quite some time, since 2010 in fact. Industry experts know BIWIN as they are the official licensee for popular brands such as Acer and HP. There is good news in this. BIWIN is expanding their consumer portfolio and has tackled Japan and the United Kingdom most recently, making their way to North America soon enough…with this Predator GM9000 SSD and a ton more of flash based products. Our first introduction with BIWIN was way back at Computex in 2012 if you might believe it. Check this old picture out!
That SSD was the BIWIN C8386 which was a SATA enterprise SSD that contained an LSI SandForce controller with a total volume of 120GB. Back to the present and the SSD on our test bench today is some 17 times higher capacity, 25 times faster, and is flat out an amazing example of how things have progressed! Another 2012 Computex shot first!
The Predator GM9000 is a PCIe 5.0 (Gen 5) x4 (4-lane) form factor 2280 (22mm wide x 80mm long) that uses the latest NVMe 2.0 SSD protocol and is available in 1,2 and 4TB capacities. Performance for this SSD is listed as 14GB/s read and 13GB/s write with up to 2000K IOPS read and 1600K IOPS write at low 4K random disk access. This drops 14GB/s read and 10.5GB/s write with 1600K read and write IOPS for the 1TB capacity. Endurance for the GM9000 starts at 800TBW (terabytes written) for the 1GB version and doubles for every capacity jump with a total of 3200TBW for the 4TB SSD.
What makes this SSD so special is it’s implementation of the SMI SM2508 controller. First off, this controller is of a TSMC 6nm process which is half the size of normal SSD controllers. This is very important as the SM2508 operates at lower temperatures and produces less heat than SSD controllers that are typically 12nm in size. This controller is capable of running at speeds as high as 3600MT/s and we saw that most recently with our Micron 4600 Gen5 SSD review that was using Micron’s latest G9 276-layer 3D NAND. Just before that, we reviewed the SMI SM2508 in an engineers sample preview report where it ran at 2400MT/s using Kioxia 162-layer BiCS6 3D TLC NAND flash memory.
The Acer Predator GM9000 is a single sided SSD that contains the SMI SM2508 8-channel NVMe SSD controller, a 2GB capacity DDR4 DRAM buffer chip and two pieces of Micron 232-layer B58R 3D TLC NAND flash memory running at 2400MT/s. It’s feature set includes Microsoft DirectStorage compatibility, ECC, SMART, APST and TRIM. Click here for a detailed GM9000 Spec sheet. There is also a ton of information available at the Predator Storage website.
Not only is a cooler SSD established through its 6nm SM2508 controller and single sided design, but also, the branding sticker is of copper foil for effective heat dissipation. Right now, Amazon UK seems to be the only place to find a price point for the Predator 9000 which is good for our UK readers but not so good for those anxiously awaiting a similarly built SSD in North America. It lists at Amazon UK for $180.36 (1TB), $309.19 (2TB) and $644.17 (4TB) and comes with a standard 5-year limited warranty.
Now for some performance metrics…