Gigabyte Introduces New AI TOP SSD

Gigabyte has recently added a new SSD to its expanding product range, and this time it's something unique. The drive is part of Gigabyte's latest AI TOP (Trillions of Operations per Second) series and was unveiled at Computex with minimal publicity. During the event, the company mentioned that it would offer 150 times the TBW of regular SSDs and was specifically designed for AI model training.

What does this 150x increase mean in practical terms? The 2 TB version of the AI TOP 100E SSD is expected to provide a whopping 219,000 TBW (TeraBytes Written), compared to the typical 1,200 TBW found in most high-end 2 TB consumer NVMe SSDs. The 1 TB version is projected to deliver 109,500 TBW. Both drives boast an MTBF time of 1.6 million hours and come with a five-year warranty.

Although Gigabyte has not disclosed the host controller or the specific NAND used, it is known that the drives utilize 3D NAND flash technology. Additionally, both drives feature a LPDDR4 DRAM cache of either 1 or 2 GB, depending on the drive size. The AI TOP 100E SSDs are standard PCIe 4.0 drives, offering a sequential read speed of up to 7,200 MB/s. The write speed for the 1 TB SKU reaches 6,500 MB/s, while the 2 TB SKU lags slightly behind at 5,900 MB/s. No other performance metrics have been provided. The drives are reported to consume up to 11 Watts during operation, which is relatively high for PCIe 4.0 drives. Pricing and availability details have not been disclosed yet.