INTRODUCTION

   The very first PCIe 5.0 Gen5 M.2 NVMe v2.0 solid state drives with performance levels going all the way up to 13000MB/s may already be here (at least in terms of announcement) but just like with DDR5 RAM compatibility issues and cost are certain to delay their rise in popularity. Honestly even PCIe 4.0 Gen4 M.2 NVMe v1.4 SSD models are nowhere near as popular as PCIe 3.0 Gen3 M.2 NVMe v1.3 ones (again primarily due to motherboard compatibility) so i really believe this alone speaks volumes about the state of the market right now. Still, there's no denying that Gen4 models are gaining ground and so today with me i have yet another such model and probably one that hasn't gotten much attention since its release, the ATOM 50 1TB by XPG.

   XPG (XTREME PERFORMANCE GEAR) was established by ADATA to provide high-performance products to gamers, Esports pros, and tech enthusiasts. We are committed to developing products that deliver extreme performance and therefore work closely with the gaming and esports community to gain insight into the real needs of users. We provide a full range of products from systems, components, peripherals to devices, and create them with the highest standards of stability, reliability, and performance in mind. We also develop products with sheer cool designs that have earned us several prestigious international awards, such as iF Design and Good Design. Beyond products, we play an active role in sponsoring and supporting esports events and teams globally to realize extreme gaming experiences at the highest levels.

   The ATOM 50 M.2 NVMe v1.4 SSD by XPG is available in 500GB/1TB capacities and is based on the not so popular RainierQX IG5220 DRAM-less NAND flash controller by Innogrit which XPG has paired with Micron's 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. The Innogrit RainierQX IG5220 is a quad-channel NAND flash controller that features support for various technologies including the Host Memory Buffer (HMB) architecture (basically takes up a fraction of your PC's system memory to cache mapping tables - only supported on versions of Windows 10/11 launched from 2019 and beyond), end-to-end data protection, Gen3 LDPC (low-density parity check) error-correction with SRAM ECC, programmable RAID, smart cache, TRIM, NCQ, AES 256-bit encryption, SHA3 256, ONFI 5.0 and Toggle 2/3/4/5.0. The above combination of hardware and software/firmware allows the 1TB variant of the ATOM 50 to climb up to 5000MB/s in reads and 4500MB/s in writes whereas in terms of durability XPG reports a TBW (terabytes written) of 650TB for both available models and a MTBF (meantime between failures) of 2.000.000 hours (both are covered by a 5 year limited warranty).