Endurance king: Gigabyte has introduced a solid-state drive designed to accommodate intensive AI workloads. The new AI TOP 100E SSD is an M.2 2280, PCIe 4.0 drive with SMART and TRIM support. The 2 TB model is rated for up to 7,000 MB/s sequential reads and up to 5,900 MB/s sequential writes, and has 2 GB of LPDDR4 RAM. What really grabbed our attention, however, is the drive’s incredible endurance.
The 2 TB AI TOP 100E carries an astronomical terabytes written (TBW) rating of 219,000. For comparison, ordinary consumer drives like Samsung’s 990 Pro PCIe 4.0 2 TB drive and Crucial’s T500 2 TB are each rated for just 1,200 TBW. Others, like the Corsair MP600 2 TB, are a bit more robust at 3,600 TBW.
Gigabyte also has a 1 TB variant with 1 GB of LPDDR4 that can hit sequential read speeds up to 7,200 MB/s and sequential writes of up to 6,500 MB/s, but the endurance is just half that of the 2 TB drive at 109,500 TBW.
Both come backed by a five-year warranty and have a mean time between failure rating of 1.6 million hours.
Gigabyte isn’t marketing these as enterprise or server-grade SSDs, but rather simply notes that they could be used for AI workloads. Indeed, if you are the type that works with large chunks of data on a daily basis or are otherwise paranoid about the endurance of standard solid-state drives, something like this may be worth looking into. Pricing and availability haven’t yet been revealed.
If raw speed is more your jam, Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen5 14000 would likely be a better fit. The 2 TB variant boasts sequential read speeds up to 14,500 MB/s and sequential writes up to 12,700. It is paired with 4 GB of LPDDR4 external cache and has a TBW rating of 1,400. You will need a board that supports PCIe Gen5 M.2, but that’s not too hard to come by these days – even at budget price points.