INTRODUCTION

   One of the things I’ve always liked about the electronics industry is that no matter your budget (price range) you can always find what you're looking for. The same of course applies for every hardware component for the PC including SSDs which are now all but divided into 4 main categories, SATA 2.5", M.2 SATA, M.2 PCIe NVMe Gen3x4 and M.2 PCIe NVMe Gen4x4. Still as expected M.2 PCIe NVMe Gen3x4 models are considered the jacks of all trades since they clearly offer the best bang for your buck (performance, capacity and cost) and so it's really not a surprise that this is what most manufacturers have decided to support, at least for now. Acer recently started offering their very own storage media (via BIWIN) and today with me i have their very first M.2 PCIe NVMe Gen3x4 SSD model, the FA100 1TB.

   Acer branded storage products are designed and manufactured by BIWIN Storage Technology company, a leading maker of quality flash memory, DRAM memory and solid-state drives (SSD storage devices). Founded in 1995, BIWIN focuses on providing global customers with high-quality storage products and specializes in the research, development, manufacturing and sales of memory chip application products.

   The FA100 line of M.2 PCIe NVMe Gen3x4 SSDs by Acer is currently available in 128GB/256GB/512GB/1TB/2TB capacities and is based on the DRAM-less Shasta+ (IG5216) 4-channel NVMe v1.4 NAND flash controller by Innogrit which this time is paired with 3D TLC NAND Flash memory (probably by Micron judging by the serial number). Now just like many other DRAM-less NAND flash controllers to make up for the lack of onboard DRAM the Shasta+ (IG5216) controller uses the Host Memory Buffer (HMB) architecture which basically takes up a fraction of your PC's system memory to cache mapping tables (remember that this feature is only supported on versions of Windows 10 launched from 2019 and beyond). This combination of hardware and software/firmware allows the 1TB variant of the FA100 to reach data transfer speeds of up to 3300MB/s in reads and 2700MB/s in writes (this is actually the fastest model of the FA100 line) with a TWB (terabytes written) of 600TB (70TB for the 128GB model, 150TB for the 256GB model, 300TB for the 512GB and 1200TB for the 2TB model). Needless to say, the Innogrit Shasta+ (IG5216) supports various technologies like LDPC (low-density parity check) error-correction with SRAM ECC, programmable RAID, smart cache, AES 256-bit encryption, SHA3 256, ONFI 4.1 and Toggle 4.0. Last but not least Acer reports an MTBF of 2 million hours and covers the entire line with a 5-year limited warranty.