GAMMIX S70 Blade

I originally sat on getting an SSD because they were so pricey. I get the 1TB SSD aren’t to steep in price but I feel like with PS5 and next gen 1TB isn’t enough and will take all that space up quickly. Especially if you are a gamer like myself. Plus I had a external 2TB hard drive(from the PS4 generation) granted you could only play PS4 games on it and store PS5 games but not play them. I finally pulled the trigger seeing the 2TB XPG Gammix S70 Blade was on sale for $249. Had some Christmas money to spend so out of pocket I paid maybe $125. This thing is a beast and worth my money if you ask me. I didn’t use the heat sink that comes with the SSD and instead opted to get the MHQJRH M.2 2280 SSD Heatsink, Double Sided Heat Sink With Thermal Silicone Pad For PC/PS5. The only part that was difficult was putting the heatsink and SSD together and installing it into the PS5 and even that isn’t very difficult. There are a lot of how to videos online and even on Amazon. The heatsink I mentioned has a video of someone installing that heat sink with a SSD and I went off that. Worked like a charm and I was able to install it my first try. When you boot your PS5 your prompted with a message saying you have a M.2 SSD and it needs to be formatted. I formatted it and I was given a read speed of 6270. Which is 700 more than the SSD on your PS5 motherboard. When I went to settings and checked the storage it was there with my external hard drive and it said I had 2.05TB free. Good to see that you actually get 2TB and a tad bit more. First thing I did was transfer games from SSD to SSD. I took Horizon Zero Dawn moved it from internal to the newly installed SSD and it transferred in 10 seconds. No joke 10 seconds. Than I took The Uncharted Collection from my external hard drive and transferred it to the new SSD that one took a bit longer due to the external not being no where near as fast as a SSD but even that took about 7-10 minutes. Last I took three games from my library Hollow Knight, Darksiders 3 and Far Cry 6 and installed them(not transfer actually install from scratch) and those three games took about 20 minutes tops. That being said this is a affordable SSD and it is legit in speed. I played Horizon Zero Dawn and Far Cry 6 and load times were identical to the mother board SSD. Can’t complain I’m a happy camper with my purchase. I now have the internal SSD of 667GB with a 2TB extra storage installed along with a external hard drive giving me 4.6TB of space. Which I personally think is more than enough to last the PS5 generation. That being said do yourself a favor and get this product it’s worth every penny if you ask me. Hardest part is the installation process but even than, it’s not that difficult.

Just got this yesterday (2/24/22), as soon as I got home from work I popped it in my PC to verify its Firmware and check if it needs to be updated. --------------- TL;DR - Not for beginners/non-electronic users. There was some hiccups because it depends on how your Motherboard BIOS/UEFI is setup because you have to make sure your M.2/NVMe slot is enabled, its PCH setting is correct and finally your Disk Configuration ASCII/RAID etc is correct to ensure correct boot-loading. ---------------- So once thats configured and you boot into your OS, the Drive should be recognized by your system, you just need to Allocate and Format it. Download the latest version tool from the Adata XGP site, then check its Firmware. All the new ones should be latest Firmware in the box, because the previous Firmware had compatibility and soft-bricking issues. Mine was already up-to-date. So next step? Shut down, removed it, put my PC side back on, then popped open my PS5! Yes I bought the XGP GAMMIX S70 Blade 2Tb for my PS5. It fits perfectly inside WITH the Heatsink on it and the M.2. cover closed. Just make sure to use that spacer disc and scree that hold it in to keep the NVMe Drive in place or it will fail to boot correctly (no display or other potential issues). Booted up my PS5 and it recognized it right away. Asked to format and it also tests the speeds. In the description it rates the S70 Blade at about 6,100Mbps, this tested at 6,200 and change. Either way its quite impressive. To test out on the PS5, I transferred about 230Gb worth of games I wasnt actively playing to the S70 Blade, which took less than 10 minutes, maybe even less time. It happened fast. Last time I transferred about 110Gb to a 4Tb Western Digital USB External HDD, took about 35-40 minutes. I definitely will update later as time goes along if there is anything different with positives or negatives.

We're one of the lucky ones who have managed to score a PS5, so we were super happy when they finally turned on the ability to add another SSD. This came highly recommended by a couple tech sites as the perfect all-in-one kit for the non-tech minded, and the price was very competitive with buying pieces individually. I will say the heat sink doesn't inspire a lot of confidence at first glance. It's a strip of metal stuck on with thermal double-sided tape, instead of being an entire enclosure. That said, I've seen a few sites saying this is all you need, so I guess why over-engineer something? It was a snap to put on, and the whole thing was easy to install. My PS5 found it right away and had no problem formatting it. The read/write speeds registered a bit slower than advertised, something like 6900 instead of 7400, but still completely adequate to the task. Files copy to it lightning fast, and playing from it is just like playing from the built-in SSD. Get this for a fast, easy solution to your storage needs!

I got this as a storage upgrade for my XPS 17 9710 that I got as a review unit from the Micron 2300 (which is the OEM version of the Crucial P5), so sinking a lot of money on a gen 4 SSD was somewhat justified. In a best-case scenario this drive will hit >7000mbps sequential read and >6500mbps sequential write in CrystalDiskMark, so it's an excellent drive for looking at big numbers. The random speeds also look pretty good in CrystalDiskMark. Be aware that the best-case scenario will always be the higher-capacity models (so 2TB) when the drive is practically empty, and when the device supports PCIE 4. Like most XPG SSDs, ADATA has included a pretty nice heat spreader that you can tape to the top of the SSD. Since the XPS 17 comes with its heat spreader in the laptop I didn't install it, but it doesn't seem to run too hot in my use cases, and if your motherboard doesn't have a heatsink for a SSD, this will at least help with what will be pretty excessive thermals when this drive is hit hard. ADATA is using an Innogrit ig5236 controller, which comes from a relatively new company but seems to be providing some very good controllers (if I remember Innogrit was founded by a bunch of former Marvell engineers) ADATA has a SSD toolbox which I do suggest downloading. In the case that you get an older model of the S70 Blade, the toolbox lets you directly update the drive's firmware, which apparently does give it a substantial boost in performance. Mine came with the latest firmware out of the box, but just something to mindful of. The major concern I have about this drive is that ADATA is one of the SSD companies notorious for swapping lower-quality parts later down in the product line, basically gaming off of reviews at launch-time. At the time of the review this is a relatively new product so I doubt ADATA has already done that, but it's just something to be aware of. So overall just remember that gen 4 SSDs will make almost no difference in everyday use for the typical consumer. A good gen 3 drive will provide the exact same performance in everyday tasks, but if you know you'll benefit from a gen 4 drive, then this thing is pretty good, just get whatever is on sale between this, the 980 Pro, the SN850, the P5 Plus, etc. I doubt Samsung, Western Digital, and Micron will swap cheaper parts for their flagship SSD, so I guess there's that the longer this drive is on the market, but ADATA does have a price advantage even when not on sale, so this is still a very good option for a proper gen4 ssd.

Cheaper option. Works great.

I needed this to fit in my HP-OMEN laptop. I had a spare PCIe Gen-4 slot and it went in fairly well even with the included heat sink installed. I was nervous about installing the heat sink myself, but it turned out not to be a big deal. After watching a few tutorial videos I was fairly confident enough to install it myself. *There was one big issue with this drive.* After physically installing the drive I thought it would be a good idea to check the website and make sure to download the current/up to date drivers. I do this with any new component, so I went to the XPG/ADATA website and found the link to download the most current software needed to properly update the drive for the highest optimization. In addition the program is supposed to be able to monitor the health of the drive and other various processes; however, when I tried installing “ADATA Toolkit”, it gave me a warning and I couldn’t proceed. It said something along the lines of: “No SATA drive Detected”, and to “Make sure my SATA drive is connected.” This is a PCIe drive though, so why would this software be listed to download underneath a drive that it is incompatible with? Makes no sense… The “ADATA toolkit” software could only be used with a SATA drive and not with this PCIE drive, even tho their website says this is the software you need. I made sure I had the right link and everything, I am 100% sure it was listed under this exact drive on the ADATA website. I read some more about similar issues online and it honestly made my head spin, some people said it’s caused by a setting in the bios, some said that ADATA/XPG removed and discontinued all previous + future software updates. The bottom line is *It just should not be this hard to get the current update for any new component.* Now I’m not sure if this is affecting the performance in any way but it’s always reassuring to have the current software for any new pc component (It makes a big difference in optimization for Graphics Cards) At the end of the day, formatting the drive was easy enough, and using crystal disk benchmark I am getting close to the 7000mb speeds as advertised, somewhat of a great product for the money, but also has been somewhat of a headache. I can’t exactly leave a terrible review despite the above mentioned issue, I’d say it’s probably going to give you the most bang for buck when used as memory expansion in a ps5 like it advertises, not so much in a top tier gaming pc.

This is for the 1TB without the heat sink. I added the MHQJRH heatsink ($10). The heat spreader does not come attached, so it was easy to add it. Room temp 76F. Ran CrystalDiskMark. M.2 Temp was at 40C (39C at idle) Read:7124MB/s, Write: 6314MB/s. Run added 176GB of writes to M.2 per CrystalDiskInfo. Unit has two 4Gb DDR4 2400MHz C17 chips (K4A8G165WC-BCTD) (older models had 2666MHz) giving 1GB of DRAM. Controller is a InnoGrit IG5236-CAA for encryption and control, which is normal for the XPG. (The ADATA one uses a subpart here). NAND Flash is four TLC Micron B47R Fortis Flash IA7BG94AYA (ADATA part 60079146) which provides 2Tb per chip giving 1TB of storage. With AES-256 the actual storage after windows formatting is 1,024,191,361,024, which converts to 953GB of storage. I installed the M.2 between the CPU fans and the GPU giving hopefully some needed airflow in that area. Other info: It is rare for a M.2 drive to have encryption, but this one has AES-256 which does not impact the storage size of the drive (It is still 1TB.) Installed into a MSI Pro Z690 Wifi DDR4 MB with i5-12600K on CPU_1 port. Short reads and writes can be faked fast due to the DRAM and OS memory buffering and supporting read-ahead, so real test would come if you moved heavy amounts of files, but it is nice to have a fast drive anyway. This is the first few hours so have no idea how long it will last; just wanted to get the chip info out since that seem to be questionable. Biggest issue I see is the encryption somehow fails and the drive is gone, otherwise, I am happy with the hardware so far.

I brought a 2tb first. Now im at the 4tb. It does what it need to do for storage. Easy to install. No slow down speeds. Design is nice. Storage is there. Compare to other brands. Price is great

I bought this item for my ps5. It works great. Its a great deal from amazon ae, for only 440dhs because its a open box, but the great things is it works perfectly on my ps5. Thanks amazon.

Kids love it, they notice the 2TB is faster than PS5 than SSD. Super fast copied 40GB in around 6 seconds ( from built in PS5 SSD to ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade 2TB) Also a noticeable difference in installing a game (Ratchet Clank) to the XPG as we had to delete it to make room previously from the built in SSD. Cant monitor the heat, left the PS5 cover on to avoid dust build-up.

C'est un très bon SSD en termes de vitesse et de refroidissement. Je l'ai d'abord utilisé pour PlayStation puis je l'ai transféré sur mon ordinateur et après 2 ans d'utilisation sur les deux plateformes, je peux facilement dire qu'il offre de belles performances.

UPDATED on 23/10/2023: A few month later - no visible performance degradation or signs of overheating, tho - I haven't used any special tooling, only perception as a user. I recently took the leap and upgraded my PS5 with this NVMe M.2 SSD storage, and I must say, it's been a delightful surprise. Installing this beast was a cinch; even if tech jargon isn't your thing, you'll sail through the process. Speed? Ah, where do I begin? The PS5 itself detected a speed of around 6300 Mbit/s. Sure, we've all seen flashy numbers, but how does it fare in the real world? To put it to the test, I transferred 200GB from the internal storage. It whisked away the data in just 3 minutes! However, remember, all these speed metrics and numbers are provided by the PS5 itself, so hats off to the manufacturer for their estimations. The cherry on top? The cost-volume ratio. The storage space you're getting at this price point is genuinely commendable. While I'm still testing the waters and can't provide insights on heating or longevity, my early impressions are nothing but positive. If you're in the market to amp up your PS5 experience, this drive is worth every cent.

Work well on GNU/Linux: Non-Volatile memory controller: ADATA Technology Co., Ltd. Device 5370 (rev 01) (prog-if 02 [NVM Express]) Subsystem: ADATA Technology Co., Ltd. Device 5370 Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx+ Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 68 NUMA node: 0 IOMMU group: 15 Region 0: Memory at fcb30000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Region 4: Memory at fcb20000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K] Expansion ROM at fcb00000 [disabled] [size=128K] Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3 Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1- D2- AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-) Status: D0 NoSoftRst+ PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME- Capabilities: [50] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable+ 64bit+ Address: 0000000000000000 Data: 0000 Masking: 00000000 Pending: 00000000 Capabilities: [70] Express (v2) Endpoint, MSI 00 DevCap: MaxPayload 512 bytes, PhantFunc 0, Latency L0s unlimited, L1 unlimited ExtTag- AttnBtn- AttnInd- PwrInd- RBE+ FLReset+ SlotPowerLimit 75W DevCtl: CorrErr+ NonFatalErr+ FatalErr+ UnsupReq+ RlxdOrd+ ExtTag- PhantFunc- AuxPwr- NoSnoop- FLReset- MaxPayload 256 bytes, MaxReadReq 512 bytes DevSta: CorrErr+ NonFatalErr- FatalErr- UnsupReq+ AuxPwr+ TransPend- LnkCap: Port #0, Speed 16GT/s, Width x4, ASPM L1, Exit Latency L1 <64us ClockPM- Surprise- LLActRep- BwNot- ASPMOptComp+ LnkCtl: ASPM L1 Enabled; RCB 64 bytes, Disabled- CommClk+ ExtSynch- ClockPM- AutWidDis- BWInt- AutBWInt- LnkSta: Speed 16GT/s, Width x4 TrErr- Train- SlotClk+ DLActive- BWMgmt- ABWMgmt- DevCap2: Completion Timeout: Range ABCD, TimeoutDis+ NROPrPrP- LTR+ 10BitTagComp+ 10BitTagReq- OBFF Not Supported, ExtFmt- EETLPPrefix- EmergencyPowerReduction Not Supported, EmergencyPowerReductionInit- FRS- TPHComp- ExtTPHComp- AtomicOpsCap: 32bit- 64bit- 128bitCAS- DevCtl2: Completion Timeout: 50us to 50ms, TimeoutDis- LTR+ 10BitTagReq- OBFF Disabled, AtomicOpsCtl: ReqEn- LnkCap2: Supported Link Speeds: 2.5-16GT/s, Crosslink- Retimer+ 2Retimers+ DRS- LnkCtl2: Target Link Speed: 16GT/s, EnterCompliance- SpeedDis- Transmit Margin: Normal Operating Range, EnterModifiedCompliance- ComplianceSOS- Compliance Preset/De-emphasis: -6dB de-emphasis, 0dB preshoot LnkSta2: Current De-emphasis Level: -3.5dB, EqualizationComplete+ EqualizationPhase1+ EqualizationPhase2+ EqualizationPhase3+ LinkEqualizationRequest- Retimer- 2Retimers- CrosslinkRes: Upstream Port Capabilities: [b0] MSI-X: Enable+ Count=66 Masked- Vector table: BAR=0 offset=00002000 PBA: BAR=0 offset=00003000 Capabilities: [d0] Vital Product Data Not readable Capabilities: [100 v2] Advanced Error Reporting UESta: DLP- SDES- TLP- FCP- CmpltTO- CmpltAbrt- UnxCmplt- RxOF- MalfTLP- ECRC- UnsupReq- ACSViol- UEMsk: DLP- SDES- TLP- FCP- CmpltTO- CmpltAbrt- UnxCmplt- RxOF- MalfTLP- ECRC- UnsupReq- ACSViol- UESvrt: DLP+ SDES+ TLP- FCP+ CmpltTO- CmpltAbrt- UnxCmplt- RxOF+ MalfTLP+ ECRC- UnsupReq- ACSViol- CESta: RxErr- BadTLP- BadDLLP- Rollover- Timeout- AdvNonFatalErr- CEMsk: RxErr- BadTLP- BadDLLP- Rollover- Timeout- AdvNonFatalErr+ AERCap: First Error Pointer: 00, ECRCGenCap+ ECRCGenEn- ECRCChkCap+ ECRCChkEn- MultHdrRecCap- MultHdrRecEn- TLPPfxPres- HdrLogCap- HeaderLog: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 Capabilities: [148 v1] Alternative Routing-ID Interpretation (ARI) ARICap: MFVC- ACS-, Next Function: 0 ARICtl: MFVC- ACS-, Function Group: 0 Capabilities: [158 v1] Secondary PCI Express LnkCtl3: LnkEquIntrruptEn- PerformEqu- LaneErrStat: 0 Capabilities: [178 v1] Physical Layer 16.0 GT/s <?> Capabilities: [19c v1] Lane Margining at the Receiver <?> Capabilities: [1b4 v1] Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) IOVCap: Migration- 10BitTagReq- Interrupt Message Number: 000 IOVCtl: Enable- Migration- Interrupt- MSE- ARIHierarchy+ 10BitTagReq- IOVSta: Migration- Initial VFs: 32, Total VFs: 32, Number of VFs: 0, Function Dependency Link: 00 VF offset: 1, stride: 1, Device ID: 5208 Supported Page Size: 00000553, System Page Size: 00000001 Region 0: Memory at 00000000fcb34000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) VF Migration: offset: 00000000, BIR: 0 Capabilities: [1f4 v1] Latency Tolerance Reporting Max snoop latency: 1048576ns Max no snoop latency: 1048576ns Capabilities: [1fc v1] L1 PM Substates L1SubCap: PCI-PM_L1.2+ PCI-PM_L1.1+ ASPM_L1.2+ ASPM_L1.1+ L1_PM_Substates+ PortCommonModeRestoreTime=10us PortTPowerOnTime=10us L1SubCtl1: PCI-PM_L1.2- PCI-PM_L1.1- ASPM_L1.2- ASPM_L1.1- T_CommonMode=0us LTR1.2_Threshold=32768ns L1SubCtl2: T_PwrOn=10us Capabilities: [20c v1] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0001 Rev=1 Len=038 <?> Capabilities: [244 v1] Data Link Feature <?> Kernel driver in use: nvme Kernel modules: nvme