Gigabyte’s Vision for really fast portable storage is here
If you’re a content creator, you probably need a medium to store all your files, be it audio, video, or images. So, an external hard drive is a no-brainer. It gives you quick access to your files whenever you need them. But as the complexity of media creation grows, so does the accompanying file size. A file that copied to your drive in under a minute, now takes two. A file that took two minutes now takes four. The larger the file becomes, the longer it takes to copy. If you’re a video editor working on 4K videos , then you’ll know the pain of copying almost terabytes of footage and tapping your fingers and toes until the files finish copying so that you can start your work. Now factor in that you’re working on a tight deadline and you realize that your trusty external drive just can’t cut it. Sure it gets the job done, but you also have your boss breathing down your neck. You need faster storage.
Gotta Go Fast
Sometimes you gotta go fast (Image Credits: Empire)
Fortunately, with the widespread use of solid state drives, external hard drives got a bump up in performance as well. Because solid state drives or SSDs contain no moving parts and only NAND flash memory (like for example on a memory card or a thumb drive), they have a significantly higher throughput, meaning you can copy files to and from the drive at a much faster rate than a traditional external hard drive. Gigabyte too has seen this trend and hopped on board, introducing their Vision Drive.
Gigabyte’s Vision lineup of products is aimed at creators, offering new and improved methods of carrying out their work. The products allow creators to work faster and efficiently, so they can get more done, with less hassle. The Vision Drive for example, brings 1TB of solid state storage with sequential read and write speeds of upto 2200MB/s. The innards of the Vision Drive consist of a 1TB PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 NVMe M.2 SSD that connects to your PC/Mac or laptop via its included USB Type C to Type C cable or Type A to Type C cable. While the latter cable can be used to plug the Vision Drive into any USB port on a device, the best performance will be seen if plugged into a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port. If you’re not sure what ports your device has, you can always check the User Manual. If you purchased a PC/Mac within the last year, then chances are you already have a high-speed USB port that fits this bill.
Behold! The Vision Drive
The included packaging contains the required cables, related documentation, a hard carrying case and a PCI Express Add-in card. The latter is usually sold separately, but Gigabyte decided to bundle both the drive, its cables and the add-in card, calling the entire package the “Vision Upgrade Kit”.
The logic here is presumably that if you’re a PC user and your system doesn’t have a Type-C port, then you can use the add-in card. The problem here is that the card uses a PCI-Express x4 interface so if your motherboard doesn’t have an additional slot, then you’re out of luck. You can obviously use the included USB Type C to Type A cable, but your transfer speeds will not be at their peak.
What’s in the box? Well now you know
Taking a closer look at the Vision drive itself, the overall footprint of it is pretty much that of a regular external drive, measuring 115mm by 72mm, with a height of 20mm. The reasoning for the somewhat bulky design is due to the PCB that houses the NVMe SSD and what Gigabyte refers to as a “Nanocarbon Heat Spreader”, used to keep the SSD cool. Added to that, the Vision Drive is also shock proof, capable of withstanding a drop from upto 1.22m (122cm).
While we don’t recommend dropping it on a regular basis, it’s good to know that it can cope with being dropped from a moderate height. The included cables are nicely wrapped and durable. The USB Type C to Type C cable plugs in both ways so you don’t have to spend time figuring out which end goes into the drive and which end goes into your PC or laptop.
The carrying case while being rugged is also wrapped in a nice cloth texture and has room for the cables so that you’re ready for any scenario.
So how does Gigabyte’s Vision drive perform in real life?
Putting the Vision drive through its paces resulted in some very interesting results. I used AS SSD Benchmark as my synthetic test and used an ISO file of Microsoft Windows as my test file to cope with the Vision drive. The ISO file is around 5GB in size, which makes it a good example for mid-range file transfers as a baseline. To make sure I was testing the drive to its full potential, I used USB 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2 ports. Lastly, I used the included PCI Express Add-In card to see if it actually made a difference. The final result?Quite interesting, as I said.
Kicking things off with the synthetic test, USB 2.0 was of course the slowest for both the benchmark and the file transfer, coming in at around 40MB for both reads and writes.
Bumping the test up to USB 3.0, the Vision drive clocked in around 430MB/s reads and writes. So far, not bad, not bad at all. USB 3.1 Gen 1 also gave me similar results to USB 3.0 (weird, yes, but it is what it is).
USB 3.2 Gen gave me a significant bump of around 960MB/s and this held true for USB 3.2 Gen 2 as well. I used both the USB Type-C to C cable as well as the Type-A to Type-C cable, just to make sure I was getting consistent results, and indeed I was.
Having reached potentially the highest available USB protocol on a PC, I was still not getting the promised 2000MB/s transfer speed which is what the Vision drive is apparently all about. The last test was to use the PCI Express Add-In card and boy, was that a bump up in speeds. The Vision drive immediately hit almost 1700MB/s sequential read speeds and around 1800MB/s write speeds, which is significantly closer to the advertised 2000MB/s value that Gigabyte talks about.
I threw the test ISO file to the mix as well as a way to gauge real world performance and indeed the results were as the benchmark showcased, with the best results being via the Add in card, albeit only transferring at around 900MB/s.
So is the Gigabyte Vision worth it?
At the end of the day, if you’re looking for a fast portable drive, you want just that; speed. The Vision drive is fast, yes. But it’s basically an NVMe SSD paired with a USB 3.2 controller and housing. If you look around eBay or Amazon, you can build your own portable drive as well. All you need is to purchase an NVMe SSD and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 compatible enclosure and you’re basically good to go. Is it worth the LKR 40,000/- price tag?
Well, that’s up to you to decide. Considering that you get the drive, a carrying case, required cables and also an add-in card, and if you factor in the value of a 1TB Gen3 NVMe SSD, the price seems decent. It’s not a steal for the price, but it’s not a bad value product either. The only issue I came across is that to get the full advertised potential, you need a PC that has an available PCI express slot. So if you’re on a laptop, you’re out of luck. If you’re on the lookout for a fast portable drive and you don’t want to put together your own, the Vision drive is a good option. It’s available at Gigabyte authorized resellers and distributors, and comes with a 5 year warranty as well.
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