Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
While I would like to see a shimmery glossy SSD like we saw on the outer packaging, it is likely the retail box will be seen more than a typical NVMe SSD. This is because they are often installed on the motherboard and can be obscured by metal heatsinks or graphics cards. The Netac NV7000-t 1TB comes with its metal heatspreader not attached, which makes our physical inspections easier. It has a neat looking design with a pattern of an array of the letter "t" from their logo. On the front, you can see the Netac logo and the product name as well as its description underneath. Physically speaking, this is an M.2 2280 SSD. The "2280" standard refers to its physical size of 22mm by 80mm. The components are located on the black printed circuit board, which we will take a glance at shortly. The Netac NV7000-t 1TB is PlayStation 5-compatible, since the total thickness is below 11.25mm.
The Netac NV7000-t 1TB works on the NVMe 1.4 logical device interface and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, this M.2 NVMe drive interfaces with PCIe 4.0. The NV7000-t 1TB uses up to four lanes for a theoretical maximum of 8000MB/s bandwidth in each direction. The specified weight is 5g for the drive alone, and an extra 1g with the included heatspreader label. As you may have already seen in the specifications, the NV7000-t comes in 512GB and 2TB capacities in addition to the 1TB.
Flipping the Netac NV7000-t 1TB around, there are no components of interest. Instead, a label is found here, and it holds miscellaneous information such as its model name, serial number, and regulatory certifications. According to the date, this was manufactured in July 2023. Unsurprisingly, this Netac SSD is manufactured in China.
Without the label, you can see almost all the parts of the Netac NV7000-t 1TB. The first is the Maxio Technology MAP1602A-F3C. This is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket that uses the PCIe 4.0 standard. It is built on the 12nm process with a 32-bit ARM Cortex R5 quad-core processor. There is no memory found on the drive itself, but rather the memory for the controller is located within the controller. This is a bit of a disadvantage to have no DRAM, as this can affect prolonged read and write performance. To alleviate this, some SSDs without DRAM may utilize HMB, or host memory buffer, and allocate some of the system's memory as a buffer location for faster access compared to flash NAND access. This is the case with the Netac NV7000-t 1TB.
The NV7000-t 1TB's flash memory is two NAND chips labeled as CD04BA40964. These are rebranded YMTC, or Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp, Xtacking 3.0 chips, which are 232-layer triple-level cell chips. Each NAND flash has 4096Mb or 512GB for a total of 1TB together. As you can see, there is area to add two more for the 2TB capacity version of the NV7000-t. Its rated write endurance is 640TBW, which works out to just over 350GB written per day for five years. This matches closely with the Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB and Crucial P5 Plus 1TB. 24GB out of the 1024GB total capacity -- just under 3% -- is provisioned for the drive controller for overhead, so the actual usable space is 1TB, as advertised. In Windows, you will see 931.5GB available. The rated power consumption was not provided.
One thing I should note is Netac recommends putting the included metal heatspreader on top of the drive if you do not have one with your motherboard. The ASUS ProArt Z690-Creator WiFi does indeed have one for this M.2 slot, but I have taken the photo with it off as a demonstration. All of the tests were executed with the motherboard's M.2 heatsink installed over the Netac NV7000-t 1TB. To see how all this hardware translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit the NV7000-t against other SSDs from manufacturers like ADATA, Corsair, Crucial, Kingston, Patriot, and Western Digital in the next seven pages or so.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i5-12600K
CPU Cooling: DeepCool AK620 Digital
Motherboard: ASUS ProArt Z690-Creator WiFi
RAM: Crucial Pro DDR5-5600 2x16GB
Graphics: EVGA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti XC3 ULTRA GAMING
Chassis: Thermaltake Core P3 TG Pro Snow
Storage: XPG Atom 30 1TB
Power: FSP Hydro PTM Pro 1200W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Netac NV7000-t 1TB
- ADATA Legend 960 1TB
- Corsair MP600 Core XT 2TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 1TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 4TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 2TB
- Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB
- Kingston KC3000 1TB
- Lexar NM710 1TB
- Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 2TB
- Patriot P400 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB
- XPG Atom 50 1TB
- XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB
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 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Conclusion
