The GIGABYTE Aorus RGB M.2 SSD Review: Nothing Is Too Small For RGB LEDs

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light

Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.

The average data rates from the GIGABYTE Aorus RGB SSDs on the Light test are close to other high-end NVMe SSDs, but the Aorus is definitely at the bottom of that product segment. There's a big gap between the Aorus drives and the tier of entry-level NVMe SSDs.

The average and 99th percentile latencies from the Aorus SSDs during the Light test are mostly too small to be of any concern, but they do still serve to show how the smaller models struggle more with full-drive performance than the 1TB Phison E12 drive included for comparison.

Average read and write latencies for the Aorus SSDs during the Light test trail behind the scores for the Samsung drives, and on the read side the ADATA SX8200 also comes out ahead, but these average latencies are too low to cause problems.

The ADATA SX8200 beats the Aorus SSDs for 99th percentile read latency, but for writes they trade places. Samsung's QoS beat either vendor.

The energy usage by the Aorus SSDs during the Light test is again a bit worse for the Aorus drives than for the 1TB Silicon Power P34A80, but given the LEDs that only the Aorus has, this result is quite welcome.