Introduction

Acer is a world-leading manufacturer of computer hardware. The company was founded in 1976, in Taiwan and is mostly known for their laptops, desktop PCs, and monitors. BIWIN Storage has been granted an official license by Acer to produce, market and sell solid-state-drives using their name.



The Acer Predator 4 TB offers tons of storage for all your needs, at a reasonable price point, while still maintaining excellent performance, thanks to the use of TLC NAND flash (not QLC). The choice of TLC is important—nobody wants a 4 TB QLC drive that gets HDD write speeds when heavily loaded. Under the hood, Acer is using the legendary MAP1602 controller that also powers famous drives like the Lexar NM790. In terms of flash, Acer relies on YMTC 232-layer TLC NAND, same as the NM790, and similar drives, which all seem to use the same hardware platform. Just like on other MAP1602 designs, a DRAM cache chip is not included.

The Acer Predator GM7 is available in capacities of 512 GB (unknown), 1 TB ($75 estimated), 2 TB ($145 estimated) and 4 TB ($270 estimated). Endurance for these models is set to 300 TBW, 600 TBW, 1200 TBW and 2400 TBW, respectively. Acer includes a five-year warranty with the GM7.

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 is pretty much the standard these days, it 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.


Acer includes a preinstalled heat spreader on the drive. Unlike other designs it doesn't have a metal foil as core, but some grayish substance.


It looks like Graphite powder that's mixed with some hardening compound.


The heat spreader is quite thin, which means it won't block thermal heat transfer significantly if you put a heatsink on top. On the other hand, the lack of mass means it can't absorb as much heat as thicker designs.

Chip Component Analysis

MaxioTech's MAP1602A controller is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses several Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores.


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.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen

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 700 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 85% of their capacity. This is intentional, to run the drive in realistic operating conditions—nobody uses a nearly-empty SSD in their system. It also puts additional stress on the pseudo-SLC cache subsystem, because there is less free NAND space to work with.
• Partitions are aligned properly.
• 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.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen