Biwin Black Opal X570 Pro SSD Review: An 8TB unobtanium m…

The Biwin Black Opal X570 Pro is a monster of a drive and a compelling alternative to the 8TB Samsung 9100 Pro.

The Biwin Black Opal X570 is a monster of a drive at 8TB and is a compelling Samsung 9100 Pro alternative, but it does have its flaws. Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test. High-end 8TB SSDs are almost mythical at this point, elusives targets that promise the ultimate combination of capacity and performance.

It doesn’t seem like too much to ask, but especially in this market, it’s getting hard to find a drive that successfully hits all of the marks. The Biwin Black Opal X570 Pro has the potential to be one of those rare breeds, as it delivers high performance in an 8TB package backed with a reasonable warranty and mature hardware. It’s a compelling alternative to the 9100 Pro, even if it’s not without its flaws.

Biwin is no longer an unknown name, as it has been aggressively positioning drives and is not afraid to use whatever hardware makes sense to do it. The X570 Pro is the bigger sibling to the X570, a DRAM-less oddity of a high-end drive, and it offers more performance as a direct competitor to the somewhat underwhelming 9100 Pro. Samsung is a name that elicits different responses from different people – some love, some hate – and the fact that this drive could have Biwin uttered in the same breath shows how far the consumer SSD industry has grown.

It helps that the X570 Pro does not disappoint in the performance department, even though it’s not the fastest drive. We’re more encouraged by the fact that we have a real 8TB sample that not only works fine, but it actually does very well in some instances. This is a monster of a drive, and even if it doesn’t quite live up to all of our standards – we would like it to be a bit more power-efficient – it’s one we could recommend if you’re an enthusiast looking for both power and capacity in one package.

The Biwin Black Opal X570 Pro, or simply X570 Pro, supports a wide range of capacities, including 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. We’re looking at the 8TB model today, and this is the first drive of this type that we’ve reviewed at such a high capacity. It can be difficult to secure SSDs right now, but it’s worth keeping an eye out for this drive and others like it. The drive is rated for up to 14,000 / 13,000 MB/s of sequential read and write throughput and up to 2,000K / 1,600K random read and write IOPS.

This isn’t record-setting, but it is definitely on the high end. Alongside the standard five-year warranty, Biwin guarantees the drive for 750TB of writes per TB capacity, which is 25% more than the typical 600TBW. Biwin supports its SSDs with the downloadable Biwin Intelligence, an SSD toolbox application. This Windows program has everything you need in one central location. Check drive health and other system information, update drive firmware, test drive performance, or migrate your data – all of this is built in for the full experience.

This is a double-sided drive, as expected of a high-capacity 8TB model, with an official power rating of <7W. There is a good reason never to believe this on a label because, frankly, it’s not always accurate. Many M.2 2230 drives were judged based on their labels, while the actual draw could have been higher or lower, so it’s best not to make that mistake. It’s also not wise to take the SMART reading at its word, in this case, with the highest power state pegged at 10W.

Our maximum in power testing below was 9.69W, which seems to align well with that reading in this case, however. It’s difficult to reach the very maximum power draw possible on a drive, but this one gets pretty close in our testing. Underneath the label, we see the very capable Silicon Motion SM2508, a DRAM-equipped controller with a full eight flash channels. This controller handles power management internally.

Unusually, the DRAM module is singular and on the back – drives with this much memory might opt for two or more DRAM modules, and more commonly a single module will be on the front. This package is 64Gbit, or 8GB, of LPDDR4/LPDDR4X from Biwin. This is an ample amount of memory and a good choice for this application. The four flash modules are at 2TB apiece with sixteen 1Tb dies, which is basically as good as it gets.

That’s needed to make 8TB work on a drive at this performance level and is actually quite the accomplishment. Biwin codes the flash, but we know it’s Micron 232-Layer TLC underneath. The other main 8TB drive with this controller is the Kingston Fury Renegade G5 which uses Kioxia 218-Layer TLC instead. That flash is more comparable to the newer 276-Layer variant of Micron’s flash rather than what we have here.

It’s worth the compromise if your main goal is to get to 8TB, especially as the SM2508 is an extremely capable controller that’s going to beat the pants off of older drives. While an 8TB WD Black SN8100, or Optimus GX Pro 8100, is supposedly on the way, the only real 8TB we’ve seen before now is Samsung’s 9100 Pro. That drive was as low as $749.99 more than once, and was probably the last chance to get a drive of this caliber at that price.

In these tougher times, though, we suspect the 8TB X570 Pro would be a good alternative even when priced near parity with the 9100 Pro. Shane Downing is a Freelance Reviewer for Tom’s Hardware US, covering consumer storage hardware.

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