Introduction

ADATA is Taiwan's largest manufacturer of flash storage and DRAM memory for computers. They have been at the forefront of SSD development for many years, bringing us famous SSDs like the SX8200, SX900, and S510.

XPG is one of ADATA's sub-brands and creates products optimized for the needs of gamers.



Back in February, we reviewed the ADATA Gammix S70, which was the first PCIe 4.0 drive powered by the Innogrit IG5236 we ever tested. Today, we bring you a review of the Gammix S70 "Blade," which seems to be the same drive, just with a different heatsink that trades mass and volume for PS5 compatibility.

As I just mentioned, the Innogrit IG5236 controller powers the ADATA S70 Blade. While Innogrit has been focusing on value SSD controllers for a long time, with PCIe 4.0, they've made a push for the high-end. Their IG5236 "Rainier" has been receiving favorable reviews across the board owing to its eight-channel architecture. Besides the controller, 3D TLC chips from Micron are used. They have been rebranded by ADATA, but I'm sure these are brand-new 176-layer B47R chips. A minor change is that instead of DDR4-3200 chips from Hynix (on the plain S70), ADATA is using 2x Samsung DDR4-2666 on the "Blade" version, which I doubt will make a big difference.

The XPG Gammix S70 Blade is available in capacities of 1 TB ($150) or 2 TB ($300). Endurance for these models is set to 740 TBW and 1480 TBW respectively. ADATA provides a five-year warranty for the S70 Blade.

This review was updated on Sep 20 with performance results for a new firmware version provided by ADATA. Firmware 3.2.F.2A comes with additional performance improvements. In our charts these results are marked as "New Firmware".

Packaging

The Drive

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


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the XPG Gammix S70 Blade connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, four flash chips, and two DRAM chips.


You can use the drive without the heatsink or install the optional, included heatsink. It's just a simple strip of metal with sticky tape on one side.

Chip Component Analysis

The Innogrit IG5236 is the company's first controller to support PCI-Express 4.0. It uses eight channels to maximize transfer rates and is fabricated on a 12 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. They have been rebranded by ADATA. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.


Two Samsung DDR4-2666 chips provide a total of 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup