Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion 

The GOODRAM IRDM PRO M.2 SSD is a really proper NVMe SSD drive with a really solid heatsink. This is a TLC NAND product, which shows in some areas (long sustained writes). It should be an excellent choice for typical office users or gamers; it should also be suitable for some heavy users (not literally, of course). IRDM’s Pro is the company’s first high-end M.2 NVMe SSD with PCI-Express 4.0 capability. As it’s paired with a Phison controller PS5018-E18-based device, the overall performance is high, close to the top SSD currently available. This can be seen in synthetic tests and, more importantly, in simulating real use. First, sequential transfers, as well as a random write, deserve praise. The black PCB includes 176-layer NAND Flash TLC B47 chips from Micron and 2 GB DRAM DDR4 SK Hynix H5AN8G6NCJ cache in two 1 GB modules. This 7 GB/sec NVMe SSD comes at a relatively high price. This is a high-performance SSD with TLC writing, great endurance, and a 5-year guarantee. 

Do we need 7000MB/sec storage units?

It is a premium performance product, often synthetically measured, and you’d need serious workloads to get the best out of it. It is usually bought by the guys that purchase a GeForce RTX 3090 or Radeon RX 6900 XT combined with some Core i9 or Ryzen 9 series processor.  Your PC isn’t going to boot faster as your OS is the bottleneck; your PC games might load a fraction of a second faster, and your application load up just as quickly as an NVMe SSD with reads/writes in the 2 GB/sec marker. In retrospect, however, we have new technologies like DirectStorage. It will allow the graphics card to load textures directly from the SSD bypassing the processor, freeing up processor cycles for other tasks, and speeding up texture load times. In this way, if they have a fast M.2 disk, they will be in the game in less than 5 seconds, even on large maps, a little time compared to the loading times we are used to today. That technology should be soon released for Windows 11 (and 10, but this one is not the optimal one for this technique) 

Endurance

Endurance is the number of times NAND cells can be written before they die and are mapped out; any data present on that cell is re-written to a healthy one. Bigger volume sizes mean more NAND cells; more NAND cells thus increase endurance. IRDM PRO M.2 offers 700 TBW (Terabyte Written) for 1 TB unit, 1400 (for 2 TB, which we’ve reviewed), and 3000 TBW for the 4 TB version. So how long does a 1400 TBW storage unit last? If you are an extreme user, you might be writing 50 GB per day (normal users likely won’t even write that per week), but based on that value, 50GB x 365days = 18.25 TB per year written. So that’s over 76 years of usage. Additionally - the reviewed drive has MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of up to 2,000,000 Hours which is theoretically ~228 years. Quite long, isn't it?

Thermals

The GOODRAM IRDM PRO M.2 SSD has a massive heatsink provided in a bundle, and it surely helps keep the temperature under control, and there’s no throttling under an extreme workload. 

Performance

The GOODRAM IRDM PRO M.2 SSD is very fast. We don’t have any negative observations about the unit. It really performs as it should.

Conclusion

The GOODRAM IRDM PRO M.2 SSD is an M.2 2280 NVMe SSD that utilizes Phison’s fastest E18 controller with TLC 3D NAND flash to support capacities of up to 4TB. The SSD is 80.4 x 24 x 10.7mm in size and features a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe interface for compatibility with PCs. Three storage capacities are available: 1TB, 2TB, and 4 TB. We believe you will not notice the real-world effect and difference between a 3GB/sec and a 7GB/sec SSD anytime soon, but DirectStorage is getting supported soon, and that’s where it will matter. If an application loads in a fraction of a second, it will be quicker in that fraction of a second. Other than that somewhat personal remark, all lights are green, TLC, high endurance, and have a warranty (5 years). The provided heatsink makes this SSD run relatively cold, and there’s no thermal throttling. For the best performance, you need a compatible Ryzen and a B550/X570 motherboard if you’re on the “red side.” If you like “the blue” s – the 11th gen and Z590 boards were the first to introduce it. GOODRAM IRDM Pro M.2 2 TB is, without any doubt, a premium product. It is evidenced by the high efficiency, quality of craft, and the manufacturer’s commitment to design. Unfortunately, this affects the price of the carrier we tested. The GOODRAM IRDM PRO M.2 SSD is priced at about 320 EUR. It’s comparable to the other similar products in the market. This SSD supports the new NVMe 1.4 standard, for which you do not need to install additional drivers; only ensure that your operating system is up to date. After that, install and format the SSD, and you’re good to go. IRDM warranties the storage unit for five years / or the claimed TBW value. In real life, you probably won’t see a difference between the gen 3.0 and gen 4.0 devices, but it’s always good to have the best you can get. 3 GB/s NVMe SSDs soon will become an industry standard. 7 GB/s versions probably will follow this lead, especially since PCIe 5.0 SSDs are close to debut (which should likely occur in Q3). If you desire the top performance, this is an enticing deal; it has an excellent performance, an outstanding 5-year warranty, and high-quality components and because of that we grant a "Recommended" award.

Recommended Downloads

• Anvils Storage Utilities
• AS SSD
• CrystalDiskInfo
• CystalDiskMark
• PC Mark Vantage Storage Tests
• SiSoft Sandra Benchmark suite
• ATTO Disk Benchmark

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