Introduction

Acer is a world-leading manufacturer of computer hardware. The company was founded in Taiwan in 1976, 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.



Today we have our first review of a solid-state-drive using the new Silicon Motion SM2508 controller. The Acer Predator GM9000 comes with support for the fast PCI-Express 5.0 interface, but unlike most other vendors, they are not using a controller from Phison, but the newest controller from SMI. Silicon Motion has been taking notes during Phison's Gen 5 market dominance and engineered a controller that's optimized with power consumption in mind, to reduce the heat output, which lets them run without a noisy, active cooling solution. The NAND flash chips are Micron B58R 3D TLC with 232-layers. A DRAM cache chip is included, too, for the mapping tables of the SSD, using 2 GB of LPDDR4-3200

The Acer Predator GM9000 is available in capacities of 1 TB ($150), 2 TB ($215) and 4 TB ($430). Endurance for these models is set to 800 TBW, 1600 TBW and 3200 TBW, respectively. Acer offers a five-year warranty with the Predator GM9000 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 5.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 4.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and two flash chips, a DRAM cache chip is included, too.


Acer includes a preinstalled heat spreader foil with a thin copper core.

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion Technology SM2508 controller is the company's first PCI-Express 5.0 controller for consumer applications. It supports PCIe 5.0 x4 and runs with eight flash channels at 3600 MT/s. SMI is fabricating the controller using a 6 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The two flash chips are Micron B58R 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.


The DRAM cache chip has a capacity of 2 GB and runs at LPDDR4-3200.

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