On April 12th, the new solid state drive manufacturer Baiwei launched a flagship solid state product with RGB heatsinks, the Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK SSD, offering three storage options of 512GB/1TB/2TB, with a starting price of 459 yuan (approximately $70).
It is believed that during last year's domestic solid state drive battle, many friends have some understanding of Baiwei, maybe even studied or bought its NV7400 standard SSD.
TapTechNews has obtained this newly released Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK solid state drive. Let's take a look at its actual performance.
The Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK SSD comes in black packaging, the front side of the packaging directly displays the rendered image of the product after lighting up, which is quite cool. The upper right corner of the front of the box also indicates the RGB certification of the four major motherboard manufacturers, indicating that the hard drive supports mainstream motherboard lighting synchronization effects, which is still very rare in mainstream solid state drive products.
The version received by TapTechNews is the 1TB version. After removing the pull-out cover, there is a flip-cover inner packaging layer inside, which supports magnetic attraction. The unboxing ceremony is full of ritual, and the high-quality packaging material also highlights its identity and treatment as a flagship solid state drive.
Opening the top cover of the inner packaging, the Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK SSD lies in a thick sponge pad, with a heatsink on the front and an additional cross screw for fixing on the M.2 slot of the motherboard.
Taking out the hard drive, you can see that the armor part is black painted with a gray uppercase BIWINLogo on the front. There are several hollowed-out areas in the armor, and the acrylic material exposed indicates the position of the light bulb and the light emission.
Looking from the side, you will see that the acrylic light strip area wraps around most of the hard drive, ensuring the lighting effect after installation. The product's armor part is tightly attached, with no hidden button design for disassembly, so you cannot see the main control chip and storage chip information on the solid state drive.
Turning to the back of the hard drive, the PCB surface is smooth, with a product label affixed, displaying various product certification marks, indicating that the Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK solid state drive is designed with a single-sided chip.
According to official introduction, this Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK solid state drive uses a flagship PCIe Gen4x4 controller, supporting NVMe 2.0 protocol. The storage chips select high-quality 3D TLC chips, with support for up to 2TB of storage capacity.
Then we installed the solid state drive on the PC and powered it on. When working, the Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK solid state drive can indeed emit a colorful and soft RGB effect, without glaring light or flickering issues, with advanced lighting effects. The Chinese name given by the manufacturer is 'Seven-colored Spirit Stone,' which I think is very appropriate. If you are a fan of 'light pollution' when building a PC and choose this hard drive, then your chassis will have another cool RGB light source, instantly increasing performance by 15%.
On the official product page, it can be seen that the 1TB version of the Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK SSD can achieve a maximum sequential read/write speed of 7400MB/s and 6500MB/s, with random read/write speeds reaching 1000KIOPS each, a claimed total write data of 1000TBW, and no independent cache capacity.
Before the test, let me introduce the testing platform for this time. The processor is the Intel Core i7-14700K, the motherboard type is B760MD5, and the memory type is DDR57600MHz 32GB*2. We mounted the solid state drive in the first hard drive slot under the CPU, and all subsequent tests are based on this platform, the results are for reference only.
First, TapTechNews used the CrystalDiskMark test software to conduct theoretical read/write scores on it. In the empty drive state, the sequential read speed easily reached over 7100MB/s and the write speed exceeded 6600MB/s, with very good 4K speed performance, truly at the flagship level. Of course, those familiar with solid state drives should know that the reason why the theoretical read speed did not reach the official claim of 7400MB/s is because the Intel platform's MPS is only 256 bytes, limiting the theoretical speed to 7.15GB/s.
So we also used another AMD platform for the empty drive test. At this time, the sequential read speed rose to over 7400MB/s for Q8T1, Q32T1 read speed also reached 7298MB/s, not to mention the Q32T16 read speed surged to 4178MB/s.
Next is 25% lightly dirty disk state, at this time the sequential read/write speeds each dropped by over 100MB/s, and the 4KQ1T1 read speed dropped to 88MB/s, but the overall level changes slightly.
Continuing to run the test in a 50% dirty disk state, surprisingly, the sequential read/write speeds rebounded, and the 4KQ1T1 read speed was around 84MB/s.
Finally, in a 75% dirty disk state test, the sequential read speed change was still not obvious, but at this time the sequential write speed decreased to around 1500MB/s. Overall, in the 1TB solid state category, the Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK solid state drive's stability performance was good.
Now let's look at the 4K throughput performance, the Baiwei NV7400RGBHEATSINK SSD achieved scores of 1147KIOPS and 1060KIOPS, perfectly meeting its dual 1000KIOPS 4K throughput promotion. Among PCIe 4.0 specification solid state drives, it is also a relatively prominent level.
SevenReadThreeWrite refers to a mixed read/write test with 4KiB in Q1T1, where most of the time you are working with small files around 4KiB when starting software from the hard drive or loading games/maps, where there is mostly reading and writing operations, with more reading and both hard drive working states occurring simultaneously, making this test very suitable for consumer's daily usage scenarios.
This test combination can be called up in the original CDM. The final test showed that the Baiwei NV7400RGBHEATSINK SSD 1TB version scored 110MB/s in the SevenReadThreeWrite test. In TapTechNews' historical solid state drive test data, a certain foreign flagship OEM solid state drive's SevenReadThreeWrite score for the 1TB version was 105MB/s, indicating that this performance is quite good.
Of course, the SevenReadThreeWrite performance mentioned above is based on an empty drive. We also tested the performance after filling 88% of the drive. The Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK SSD showed a certain degree of decline, reaching 82MB/s.
In PCMark10, there are storage test items specifically for solid state drives, divided into data drive and system drive projects. The most commonly used is the data drive test, as many users will store data such as large games, videos, and other files. In the data drive test project, the Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK SSD scored 3743 points, with a bandwidth speed of 561.26MB/s and an average access time of 42us.
At the same time, we also conducted a system drive test project. The Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK SSD scored 2848 points, with a bandwidth speed of 433.20MB/s and an average access time of 56us, making it more suitable for use as a storage drive.
Since the Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK SSD uses HMB memory caching technology and the SRAM-integrated SmartCache architecture, it means that it can significantly improve read/write speeds through intelligent memory usage to communicate between the CPU and SSD.
Now let's test the cache size of the Baiwei NV7400RGBHEATSINK SSD 1TB version, and how the internal and external cache speeds perform. We used the software HDTunePRO to generate a 200GB data package in zero data reading and writing mode, with reading and writing speeds around 6000MB/s, and an average read/write speed of approximately 6064MB/s, showing a smooth and regula r read/write curve, consistent with the characteristics of a full drive simulation.
Since HDTunePro can only generate a data package of up to 200GB, we used another software urwtest which puts a greater load on the hard drive to perform a full drive write test, observing the cache size, internal and external cache speeds, etc. Looking at the real-time write data on the last line of the software, the Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK initially had an average real-time write speed of around 3300MB/s.
When the write capacity reaches around 173339MB (approximately 169GB), the average write speed drops to 1368MB/s, which is a very interesting data point, something we will mention again later.
Finally, when there is about 20% remaining space on the drive (200GB), the speed drops to 500MB/s after cache evictions, which is still acceptable.
Of course, due to some limitations and rules of the Windows system, the speed performance when users perform real data copy, and file copy operations differ from the theoretical and actual read/write speeds tested by the software, so simulating solid state drive-to-drive copy, and in-drive copying tests are also necessary. Coincidentally, we prepared two large-volume single-file packages this time, with file sizes of 168GB and 52.9GB, the larger file package capacity almost corresponded to the hard drive usage space during the first level slowdown in the urwtest.
First, let's look at the read speed. Copying a 52.9GB single file from the NV7400HEATSINK to another PCIe 4.0x4 solid state drive, the actual maximum single file read speed was 2.98GB/s. When conducting a dual-file copy, the actual maximum read speed for both files was 1.88GB/s.
Looking at in-drive copying, with two 168GB file packages already in the hard drive, pasting one single file package directly into the drive, the maximum actual copy speed at this time was 1.97GB/s.
As mentioned earlier, urwtest shows that the hard drive slows down if the storage exceeds approximately 169GB, although the Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK can continue full-speed transmission by recycling junk files, the latter part of in-drive copying, speeds will still drop to 500MB/s, consistent with the test resultsin urwtest.
Next is cross-drive writing, the same way as cross-drive reading, copying a 52.9GB single file package from another PCIe 4.0x4 solid state drive to the Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK, the actual maximum single file write speed was 2.82GB/s, and with dual-file copy, the actual maximum write speed was 2.27GB/s.
Finally, let's look at the temperature performance. After starting up without any data operation, we opened CrystalDiskInfo software to check, the idle temperature of the Baiwei NV7400RGBHEATSINK SSD 1TB version was 39 degrees, quite cool.
In a heavy load working scenario, using the urwtest full drive simulation write test as a reference, after continuously writing data packages for 5 minutes, the temperature on CrystalDiskInfo reached 47 degrees, not even reaching 50 degrees, fully indicating that its temperature control algorithm and armor heatsink design played their proper role. Users do not need to worry about high heat causing speed drops due to being unable to install the motherboard's builtin heatsink armor.
Through a series of tests, the overall performance of the Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK SSD 1TB version meets the level of a flagship PCIe 4.0x4 solid state drive. Particularly, gamers can consider it, as compared to the standard NV7400 solid state drive, it not only comes with a cool RGB armor, but also has an efficient temperature control algorithm, combining high performance and stable operation. Of course, I would recommend the 2TB version more, after all, the total data write volume of 2000TBW is doubled compared to the 1TB version, and the simulated cache space provided will be more ample.
Moreover, many people may still be unfamiliar with the Baiwei brand, but Baiwei is actually a large company with mature storage business and technology strength. Before launch ing its own brand storage products, it has already operated many storage products for first-line PC brands such as HP, Acer/Predator, etc. Coupled with this solid state drive's 5-year quality guarantee and a policy of changing but not repairing, users do not need to worry about quality and service life. With a wide variety of solid state products available in the domestic market, the launch of the Baiwei NV7400HEATSINK solid state drive undoubtedly provides consumers with a reliable and personalized choice.