By: Aaron Lai
July 6, 2018
On a random sunny day, I was driving to my friend's place with my windows slightly open. I had just started moving away from an intersection when something small and furry hit me on the cheek. It was a bit of a shock considering I do not generally expect to be hit in the face while driving. I looked around my car but had no idea what it was. At the next red light, I slowed down and glanced towards my passenger side. Near the window was a bee that measured two to three centimeters long and was trying to exit the vehicle. With my quick reaction, I opened the passenger side window and the bee flew out. While I am generally okay with bugs, I do not love them, especially the stinging ones. However, while I was pretty fearful of it, the bee too was trying to get out. It ran itself into the window several times, trying to escape the moving hunk of metal and glass. At the end of the day, I laugh at this event because it comes down to perspective. Both the bee and I were afraid of each other for different reasons, and we both wanted to return to a more normal environment. When Gigabyte announced they were entering the SSD market with their UD PRO series, a lot of people thought this was yet another manufacturer in the already over-saturated market. However, in Gigabyte's perspective, they clearly saw this as a market where they could be competitive in. Marketed as a wallet-friendly way to bring speed to your machine, the Gigabyte UD PRO 256GB is not meant to defeat any records. However, how will it perform and is it competitive enough to justify Gigabyte's perspective? Let us read on to find out!
Today's review unit of the Gigabyte UD PRO 256GB arrived to us from Gigabyte's offices in the industrious City of Industry, California. Traveling via UPS and their standard ground service, the box arrived in a pretty good condition. This was shipped to us in a black corrugated cardboard box rather than the typical brown box we are used to. All of the edges are taped up with packing tape to ensure prying hands did not get into this package while in transit. Upon opening up this box, the drive can be found in its retail container. However, what is interesting is that this box was actually an inverted Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti retail container. It would have been nice to see graphics card from them too, but I guess we will be content with what we have today.
Gigabyte has been exploring new areas for hardware and today we have a venture into the solid state storage game with their UD PRO series. This box comes in a similar fashion as other SSDs, at least in terms of form factor. The box does not have a whole lot of other interesting things about it, which is not too surprising. In the bottom corner, we have the size specified, which is a 256GB variant. Gigabyte also offers a 512GB model in this same series. Around the box, you can see some more features and specifications of the UD PRO series. Otherwise, there is not too much about this black box to look at, so I pulled the drive out.
Before we continue on, I have grabbed the specifications from the manufacturer's website for your perusal:
- Interface: SATA 6.0Gb/s
- Form Factor: 2.5-inch internal SSD
- Total Capacity: 256GB*
- Warranty: Limited 3-year or 100TBW***
- NAND: Toshiba BiCS3 3D TLC
- External DDR Cache: 256MB
- Sequential Read MB/s: Up to 530 MB/s
- Sequential Write MB/s: Up to 500 MB/s
- Random Read IOPS: Up to 70k
- Random Write IOPS: Up to 40k
- Dimension (W x H x L): 69.85 x 7 x 100 mm
- Mean time between failure (MTBF): 1.8M hours
- Power Consumption (Active): Average: R : 1930mW; W : 2430mW
- Power Consumption (Idle): 170mW
- Temperature (Operating): 0°C to 70°C
- Temperature (Storage): -40°C to 85°C
Out of the box, Gigabyte has not provided much else other than the UD PRO 256GB itself. A clear plastic shell holds the solid state drive to protect it from bouncing around in the box. Finally, a white piece of documentation can be found, specifying the warranty period and some installation instructions. As you saw from the specifications, the drive is covered for up to three years warranty. They do expect around a 100TB written life endurance, which is pretty average. For example, this number is the same as the Kingston UV500 240GB we looked at a couple of weeks ago.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 3.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 4.60
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 9.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark Vantage
10. Benchmark: PCMark 8
11. Conclusion
