Gigabyte’s Aorus 8TB PCIe SSD is all-you-can-eat storage

Fast storage drives are small. Big storage drives are slow. But you need a huge swath of fast, local storage. Gigabyte has an answer for you in the Aorus Gen4 AIC SSD 8TB PCIe add-in card. That is if you have a system that can handle it and a wallet that can take the abuse, at least.

The AIC 8TB is a monster. This add-in card houses four 2TB NVMe SSDs that run on PCIe 4.0 x4. The drives work together Voltron-style as a single 8TB block of storage. Gigabyte says this thing can manage a throughput of 15,000 MB/s on both read and write. For comparison, a single M.2 NVMe drive in ideal conditions can achieve speeds of around 3,500 MB/s. A 2.5-inch SATA SSD is closer to 550 MBps.

The card is thin, but it gets hot enough that Gigabyte has a copper heatsink on the card paired with a blower cooler. Gigabyte has also placed eight temperature sensors on the card that you can monitor with the Aorus Storage Manager software.

A certain kind of system

If you're thinking about putting one into your system, though, there are two important things to be aware of. This is a PCIe 4.0 device, so you'll need a motherboard that can support it. And while Gigabyte has a product page up for the SSD, that page doesn't offer any pricing information. If we take a peek at the cost of a 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD, though, we're looking at an estimate that bottoms out at around $1300. The actual price could be much higher. If you're dropping this kind of money, though, you'll appreciate the 5-year warranty attached to the device. As with pricing, Gigabyte has not yet revealed a date for availability, either.

If you have the system that can handle this, though, the days of waiting for PC games to load would be all but a memory with this beast of a storage device. As long as you don't need any RGB LEDs. The Aorus Gen4 AIC SSD 8TB is blissfully free of (or sorely lacking) any lighting.

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