Introduction

Neo Forza is a relatively young manufacturer of DRAM memory modules and flash memory products. The Taiwanese company was founded in 2018 as the enthusiast-focused brand of Goldkey, a well-established producer of computer hardware focusing on OEM manufacturing until recently.



Today we're testing the Neo Forza NFP495, the company's newest high-end PCI-Express 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD, which comes at amazing pricing of just $175 for the reviewed 4 TB version. What makes this drive even more special is that it's using a controller made by TenaFE—a new American SSD controller design house that's made up of former employees from Micron, Hynix and others. I also like that Neo Forza is releasing a 4 TB variant—a capacity that has become very desirable for power users because SSD prices have dropped so much. The NAND flash chips are YMTC 232-layer 3D TLC, just like on many competing drives using the MAP1602 controller. A DRAM cache chip is not included, to help achieve the highly competitive $175 price point (for 4 TB, not 2 TB). According to TenaFE, their controller is designed for DRAM-less operation and makes use of the HMB feature.

The Neo Forza NFP495 is available in capacities of 1 TB ($60), 2 TB ($100) and and 4 TB ($175). Endurance for these models is set to 700 TBW, 1400 TBW and 2800 TBW, respectively. Neo Forza includes a five-year warranty with the NFP495 SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


PCI-Express 4.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the SSD controller and four flash chips. A DRAM cache is not available.


Neo Forza's sticker comes with a copper core, which helps to soak up heat and distribute it over a larger surface area.

Chip Component Analysis

This is TenaFE's first controller that made it into a mass market SSD. The TenaFE TC2201 is a four channel design with support for NVMe 1.4 running at up to 2400 MT/s. The controller is engineered to work without DRAM and has support for both TLC and QLC NAND flash.


The four flash chips are YMTC 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• M.2 drives are tested with a fan blowing on them; that is, except for the results investigating uncooled behavior on the thermal testing page.

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 600 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 80% of their capacity
• Partitions are properly aligned.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.