Greenliant 1TB M2230 ArmourDrive NVME
2. Performance
The Samsung Magician v7.0 offers a quick look at the drive's performance with around 3.7GB/sec reading and 2.5GB writing performance.
The AJA Test System shows a quick overview of the drive's reading/writing speed, having around 2.35GB/sec writing and around 2.87GB reading.
Passing to a more well-known benchmark, the ATTO Disk Benchmark shows the performance with various file sizes from 0.5Kb, 1Kb, and 2Kb up to 8192MB file sizes. The Greenliant 1TB ArmourDrive keeps its promises and delivers up to 3.6GB/sec reading and 2.78GB/sec writing, slightly higher than the official specs.
Passing to the newest ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01.0F1, again performance was very good even after 32Kb-sized files and delivers very good performance.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.4
CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2
CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0
CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4
The drive got an average score of 5399 points with a not very high 4K reading performance.
Most of the above tests showed that the Samsung 990Pro 1TB is faster, especially in the sequential tests and mostly in the writing part.
Passing the IOMeter test, the Greenliant 1TB ArmourDrive has average performance, compared with the traditional M2280 drives, resulting in a score of 18208,33 points.
Passing to real-life writing tests now, we used a Samsung 980Pro 1TB drive as the source to test the writing abilities of the Greenliant 1TB ArmourDrive.
The first test was to try to write a rather big single file of 44GB data from the Samsung 980Pro 1TB to the drive itself. The writing performance was very good (averages 2.3GB/sec) and we didn't have any drop in writing speed. All tests were done with TerraCopy software.
The next step was to find out the writing limits of the DRAM less design, this time we used a single 200GB file of data from the Samsung 980Pro 1TB to the Greenliant drive.
The drive had a good performance at the start (2.1GB/sec writing performance) and after writing 60GB of data drops its writing speed to only 144MB/sec and after 180GB rises to 240Mb/sec and ends the test.
As a last test, we used a 67GB file of mixed files and folders to see how the drive will behave, overall good performance we can say.
Lastly, we checked the reported drive temperatures via SMART and HWInfo64 software. While we had applied the stock passive Asus SSD heatsink that comes with the motherboard, the reported temperatures aren't low, meaning at full load the drive reports at sensor 2, around 80 celsius, while the other two sensors are much lower at 63 Celsius.
Running the Greenliant 1TB ArmourDrive without any kind of heat sink will introduce thermal throttling, Greenliant also commented "...The temperature reading is in the right range for this high-performance NVMe PCIe Gen4 2230 SSD when it runs at full speed. The SSD is equipped with a thermal throttling function to protect the device from overheating, and we also recommend using a heatsink (or equivalent heat spreader) for write-intensive applications..."