Introduction

SSTC is a Vietnamese manufacturer of various computer products like SSDs, CPU coolers, monitors, notebooks and memory modules. Even outside of Asia, their products are known in enthusiast circles to offer good performance at excellent pricing.



Today we're testing the SSTC Tiger Shark Elite, which is the 12 GB/s version of the Tiger Shark that launched a little earlier. Both drives utilize the blazing fast PCI-Express 5.0 interface, which doubles the potential transfer rates over PCIe Gen 4. Internally, SSTC is using the Phison E26 controller, that also powers all the other currently available Gen 5 SSDs. Other vendors such as Samsung, WD, Kioxia, Silicon Motion and Innogrit are working on their own designs, but have nothing to show yet. For NAND flash the SSTC drive is using Micron's newest B58R 3D TLC NAND with 232-layers. As expected for a high-end drive, a DRAM cache chip is included. Compared to the Corsair MP700, our first Gen 5 SSD review, the Tiger Shark Elite comes with newer firmware and support for 12 GB/s instead of 10 GB/s, so it will be interesting how much of a difference that can make in real-life.

The SSTC Tiger Shark Elite is available in capacities of 1 TB ($190) and 2 TB ($300). Endurance for these models is set to 600 TBW and 1200 TBW, respectively. SSTC includes a three-year warranty with the Tiger Shark Elite SSD.