Gigabyte is going to release a PCI-e plug-in card with four PCI-e 4.0 SSDs of 2TB in raid configuration. When used on a pci-e 4.0 x16 slot and raid 0 configuration, the card achieves sequential read and write speeds of up to 15GB/s.
The Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 AIC SSD 8TB contains four NVME SSDs of the m2-2280 format, each with a capacity of 2TB. Furthermore, the card is equipped with a copper heatsink and a 50mm fan to cool the SSDs.
These are PCI-e 4.0 SSDs based on the Phison PS5016-E16 controller. The plug-in card makes it possible to combine the speed of those SSDs, provided the card is placed in a PCI-e 4.0 x16 slot. Random reads and writes go at 430,000 and 440,000iops according to Gigabyte.
Currently, the AMD X570 platform with Ryzen 3000 processors is the only consumer system with PCI-e 4.0 support. However, that platform doesn’t offer enough pci-e lanes to use both the plug-in card and a video card at full speed. Future Threadripper processors and motherboards could change that. The Epyc server platform also offers more pci-e lanes, but Gigabyte places its 8TB plug-in card in the Aorus consumer line and does not aim for use in servers.
Gigabyte already demonstrated its 8TB plug-in card during the Computex fair in May. Now the Taiwanese brand has released the full specifications and put a product page online. When the product will hit the market and at what price is still unknown. The 2TB SSD, of which there are four in the device, currently costs around 473 euros.