Acer Predator GM7000 SSD 4TB, M.2 2280 / M-Key / PCIe 4.0 x4

In a market that's full of Phison-powered drives, it's always refreshing to see some change. The Acer Predator GM7000 is such a drive. It's powered by the Innogrit IG5236, a modern 8-channel high-end PCI-Express 4.0 controller. Innogrit was founded a few years ago by ex-Marvell staff who decided to engineer their own SSD controller, so these people know what they're doing. Previously, the chips from Innogrit were limited to the low and mid-range segment, but with the IG5236, they are targeting the high-end enthusiast market. The IG5236 supports TLC NAND, DRAM cache, and eight flash channels. The other components on the Acer Predator GM7000 are four 176-layer 3D TLC flash chips made by Micron, and 4 GB of fast Hynix DDR4-3200 DRAM for the mapping tables of the SSD. Compared to the 2 TB version that I reviewed in 2021, the obvious change is that each of the flash chips now has 1 TB capacity instead of 512 GB. Also the flash chips are 176-layer Micron, while some earlier GM7000 1 TB and 2 TB versions shipped with 96-layer flash. Last but not least, the DRAM cache is doubled in size, to go with the bigger capacity, but it's also received a small speed bump, to DDR4-3200, up from DDR4-2666.