Everyone who knows anything about PC performance knows that NVMe M.2 SSD drives are the way to go for the fastest disk performance. Sure, large M.2 SDDs come at a cost but the performance advantage is undeniably top. That said, the cost of M.2 SDDs have rapidly come down and the Aorus RGB M.2 SSD from Gigabyte is pretty reasonably priced. Let’s take a look.


Gigabyte Aorus M.2 SSD


First look at the Gigabyte RGB M.2 SDD

It’s called the RGB M.2 SDD for a reason: the drive comes with RGB lighting. Gigabyte is well-known for implementing top-class RGB lighting across its product ranges, including this NVMe drive. And it’s not just about the visual effect, this Gigabyte drive offers the goods in terms of specification too.

Gigabyte Aorus M.2 SSD -1

You’d expect an NVMe M.2 SSD drive to be highly specified, and that’s the case here. This drive offers sequential read speeds of up to 3840 MB/s, thanks in part to the 512 MB external DDR cache on the drive. It’s responsive too offering 360,000 random read IO operations per second and should be set to last a lifetime thanks to a 1.8m hour mean time between failures.

From a physical perspective, it looks like a top-quality device that is tidily packaged. You get a very solid heat spreader which should help assure the ongoing reliability of this drive. 


Gigabyte Aorus M.2 SSD -2


How about the drive’s performance?

Manufacturer specifications and real-world performance can easily be two different things, but the Gigabyte RGB M.2 SSD is exactly as fast as the manufacturer claims. In part, it’s thanks to the use of the expansive heatsink as, in contrast to cheaper drives, the Gigabyte drive can keep going for hours without suffering a drop in performance.