Netac NV7000-Q 1TB SSD Review

Netac has a huge number of flash-based storage products including a range of SSDs. The flagship drive family of the range is the NV7000 and the latest addition to the range is the NV7000-Q. The new drive stands out from the rest of the family not only because it is only available at launch as a 1TB unit, but it also uses Quad-level cell (QLC) NAND as opposed to the TLC NAND that the others in the NV7000 family use.

At the heart of the NV700-Q is a Maxiotech MAP1602A 4-channel controller. A DRAM-less design, the MAP1602A uses Host Memory Buffer (HMB) 3.0 technology, which uses system memory instead of a dedicated cache chip and uses Dynamic SLC cache writing technology. Built on a 12nm process, the MAP1602A uses ARM Cortex-R5 architecture with a fast 2400 MT/s flash interface which helps performance, the controller supports Sequential performance speeds of up to 7,400MB/s and up to 6,500MB/s for read and writes respectively. Random 4K performance is rated as up to 1,000,000 IOPS for both reads and writes.

For the NV7000-Q, Netac has paired the controller with two 512GB NAND packages of YMTC 232-Layer 3D QLC NAND.

Netac rates the Sequential performance for the NV7000-Q as up to 7,100MB/s for reads and 6,200MB/s for writes. Using the default CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark we could confirm the official figures with a best default test results of 7,229MB/s and 6,216MB/s for reads and writes respectively. Switching over to the compressible data test saw the read performance rise to 7,443MB/s but the writes falling to 5,872MB/s.

As for 4K random performance, we couldn't find an official rating for the drive but the Maxiotech controller is rated up to 1,000,000 IOPS for reads and writes. With our four-threaded testing, the best-read figure we saw was 667,768 IOPS (QD32), so it's way short of the official 1,000K maximum. However, even though the drive was short of the official figure, the drive still is the fastest 1TB Gen 4 drive we've seen to date through all the featured queue depths – 1, 2, 4 and 32. Using the default Peak Performance Profile in CrystalDiskMark 8 we could confirm the official read figure with a test result of 1,066,698 IOPS.

The best random write figure we saw from our four-threaded testing was 483,009 IOPS (QD32). Again, it's well short of the official figure but as with the random read performance, the Netac NV7000-Q it still is the fastest 1TB Gen 4 consumer drive we've seen to date. Using the default Peak Performance Profile in CrystalDiskMark 8 we came up short of the official maximum at 896,142 IOPS.

The NV7000-Q is supported by Netac's SSD management utility called SSD ToolBox. It might not have the funky GUI of some of its competitors' utilities but does have all the basics to help you maintain the drive including the ability to perform firmware updates, Secure Erase and data migration.

We haven't yet found the NV7000-Q on sale but we are told it should land around the £102.99 mark.

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Pros

• Very fast drive.
• Endurance.

Cons

• Write speeds in some benchmark tests.

KitGuru says: Netac's NV7000 family have all been fast Gen. 4 drives and up to now have all have been 3D TLC NAND equipped. The NV7000-Q changes the NAND type, switching over to QLC NAND but still retaining the fast performance of the rest of the product line.

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