Acer’s Predator brand has produced some of our favorite gaming notebooks and monitors, but the depth of the line doesn’t stop with the showy stuff. The Acer Predator GM7000 (starts at $84.95; $269.99 for 2TB as tested) is the family’s first PCI Express 4.0 internal solid-state drive, and it proved every bit as worthy of the Predator moniker as Acer’s larger, blingier kit. The M.2 SSD effectively tied the ADATA XPG Gammix S70 Blade for our fastest throughput speeds ever in a single consumer-grade SSD, and pretty much matched that Editors’ Choice award winner in features and performance down the line. Thanks to its inclusion of data cloning and backup software, the GM7000 offers a tad more value than the S70 Blade and becomes our latest Editors’ Choice honoree among high-performance SSDs.
A Ravenous PCI Express 4 SSD
The Acer GM7000 is a four-lane PCIe 4.0 drive manufactured on an M.2 Type 2280 (80mm long) “gumstick” circuit board. Based on Micron’s 96-layer TLC NAND flash, the Predator drive employs the NVMe 1.4 protocol over the PCIe 4.0 bus and features an Innogrit IG5236 controller. (If this lingo has you baffled, check out our handy SSD dejargonizer.)
Between the drive and its Predator label is a thin heat spreader that Acer describes as a graphene-laced foam pad. The GM7000 easily meets the specifications for use as a secondary drive for Sony’s PlayStation 5; as an accessory, Acer offers an aluminum heatsink that is still compact enough for PS5 use.
In addition to the capacities listed above, Acer has indicated that a 4TB version is in the works.
The rated (and tested) sequential read speed of the 2TB model we tried puts the GM7000 at the pinnacle of today’s PCIe 4.0 internal SSDs, alongside a handful of speedsters in the 7,000MBps club including the abovementioned ADATA XPG S70 Blade, the Silicon Power XS70 (currently under review), and the WD Black SN850.
The GM7000’s durability, as measured in terabytes written (TBW), is in the mainstream of PCIe 4.0 drives. The Crucial P5 Plus and WD Black SN850 each match its 300TBW for the 500GB and 600TBW for the 1TB model, while having a slightly lower 1,200TBW at the 2TB capacity. The Kingston KC3000 has slightly higher ratings of 800TBW for 1TB and 1,600TBW for 2TB, as does the XPG S70 Blade at 740TBW for 1TB and 1,480TBW for 2TB.
A few PCIe 4.0 drives offer much higher durability ratings—the Corsair Force Series MP600 and the Silicon Power US70 are rated at 1,800TBW for 1TB and 3,600TBW for 2TB. Conversely, QLC-based drives like the Mushkin Delta and the Sabrent Rocket Q4 are less durable, rated at just 200TBW for 1TB, 400TBW for 2TB, and 800TBW for 4TB.
The “terabytes written” spec is a manufacturer’s estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. (TBW generally scales 1:1 with capacity, although the 2TB Predator GM7000 is rated for a bit more than double the TBW of the 1TB stick.) Acer’s warranty covers the GM7000 for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in data writes, whichever comes first.
The GM7000 supports AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption, the gold standard for consumer-level data protection. The drive comes with a download card for a free customized version of Acronis True Image OEM cloning software, which gives users access to easy data transfer and backup.
Testing the Acer GM7000: Blazing Throughput Speed and Photoshop Chops
We test PCI Express 4.0 internal SSDs using a desktop testbed with an MSI X570 motherboard and AMD Ryzen CPU, 16GB of Corsair Dominator DDR4 memory clocked to 3,600MHz, and a discrete graphics card.
We put the Predator GM7000 through our usual internal solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, and PCMark 10 Storage. In addition, we’re including—for the first time—results for UL’s 3DMark Storage Benchmark, which measures a drive’s performance in a number of gaming-related tasks.
Crystal DiskMark’s sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files.
In Crystal DiskMark testing, the GM7000 slightly exceeded its stratospheric sequential read and write speed ratings and effectively matched the XPG S70 Blade, with a minutely lower write score but a barely higher read score (in fact, our highest read score ever). The Predator’s Crystal DiskMark 4K scores were also top-notch, with its 4K read score the highest in our group of comparison drives and the 4K write score just shy of the top.
In the PCMark 10 Overall Storage benchmark, which measures a drive’s speed in completing a series of everyday storage tasks, the GM7000 was in a small group of drives near the top of the pack. In our PCMark 10 traces, which focus on specific tasks, the Acer posted the high score in both Windows booting and Adobe program loading, while it was middling in the ISO and File Copy tests. In the game-loading trace, the GM7000 was very close to the ADATA S70 Blade, though the Predator had a small edge in loading Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, where it was one of the top performers.
Gamers have relied on the 3DMark benchmark to gauge the performance of their CPUs and GPUs for more than two decades. The new 3DMark Storage Benchmark measures times for installation, loading, playing (while recording a gameplay video), saving, and/or copying a Steam folder of various AAA games including Battlefield V, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, Overwatch, The Outer Worlds, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. For the past few months, we’ve been using the new test on internal SSDs received for review, and we’ve also run it on some previously reviewed drives that we have in house.
Based on our (still admittedly limited) pool of PCIe 4.0 drives, the GM7000’s 3DMark Storage score is in the lower middle of the pack. The only SSD we listed with an appreciably higher score is the WD Black SN850, and the only one that’s much lower is the MSI Spatium M480 HS. (Unfortunately, we were not able to run this new benchmark on the XPG S70 Blade.)
This SSD Hungers for Prey
In many ways, the Acer Predator GM7000 and the ADATA XPG Gammix S70 Blade are evenly matched, and you can’t go wrong with either drive. Both matched their sizzling throughput ratings in real-world tests, and generally performed well in our other benchmarks. They both work with PlayStation 5s as well as PCs, offer 256-bit AES encryption, and ship with heat spreaders rather than full-fledged heatsinks. While the Blade includes ADATA’s suite of drive health and diagnostic tools, the Predator includes a version of Acronis True Image cloning software that facilitates data transfer and backups. It beats the Blade by a hair to become our newest Editors’ Choice winner among high-end internal M.2 SSDs.
