Netac NV7000-Q 1 TB Gen4 NVMe SSD Review – More Mainstream Storage For The Masses

While PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSDs are setting new storage performance benchmarks, the real-life and application benefits of getting those drives are still not worth the price you are paying for them. It's still very much an early adopter product for now and while we appreciate the speed-up, we would love to see the performance transition from synthetic benchmarks to actual use cases.

And you know what's still considered quite fast without breaking your wallet? The current-gen PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs. Gen 4 SSDs are now available at very affordable prices while offering great performance, Keeping this in mind, Netac has released its brand new NV7000-Q SSD which is a QLC drive featuring a Maxio Gen4 controller & aims to the mainstream masses with an attractive price point of $80 for the 1 TB variant which will be testing today.

The Netac NV7000-Q is the latest addition to the "NV" series, high-performance SSDs. The company so far focuses all its development efforts on the Gen4 segment but updates in Gen5 SSD space are also expected once mainstream controllers become widely available. The Netac NV7000-Q SSDs are based on the NVMe SSD form factor and feature QLC-based 3D NAND flash, offering 1 TB of capacity, better performance, and slightly lower power input.

The SSDs are based on the Maxio "MAP1602A-F3C" controller which is PCIe 4.0 compliant. The chip is based on a 12nm process node and features a 4-core Arm Cortex R5 processor. Being a cheaper alternative to faster Gen4 drives, the SSD comes without DRAM cache & only features an onboard HMB. The SSD also features YMTC 232-layer QLC (4-bit) NAND Flash.

As for the performance aspects, the Netac NV7000-Q 1 TB SSD is rated at 7100 MB/s Read, 6200 MB/s Write, and an endurance of 640 TBW. The memory is only listed in 1 TB flavors for now, but we can expect future expansion in the NV7000-Q lineup.

The Netac NV7000-Q 1 TB SSD comes in a standard package. The package is colored black and has a reflective nature, plus it features a picture of the SSD. The front lists the 1 TB capacity.

The back of the package lists some specifications of the SSD and some performance figures which we will get to in a bit.

The Netac NV7000-Q SSD package includes a manual and the SSD itself which is protected under a clamshell plastic case. There's no heatsink in the package since it can pretty much sustain max load without any thermal bottlenecks like the Gen5 drives.

The front of the SSD has the standard sticker. This is the standard NVMe 1.4 standard & measures 22 x 80 x 2.3mm (LxWxH).

The front of the SSD has a sticker which also features a thin thermal pad underneath it to keep the SSD running cool. Given that most motherboards today come with a pre-installed M.2 heatsink, you can pretty much run the SSD as it is or put it under one of those cooling solutions to ensure better stability.

There are two NAND Flash chips and the Maxio Gen4 controller situated on the front. These NAND Flash chips are the "YMC8G004Tb74CA1C0" spec. You can note that the SSD has two empty NAND Flash spots which point to higher 2 TB capacities in the future.

The non-heatsink drive will perfectly fit inside a laptop and Mini PC, where there's not enough room to accommodate a large heatsink.

Our test platform for this review consisted of an Intel Core i9-13900K processor which ran at stock clocks on the MSI Z790 ACE motherboard. The platform was coupled with 32 GB of DDR5 memory from G.Skill (Trident Z5/ 16 GB x 2) and the MSI MEG Ai1300P PSU. For graphics, I used the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM X. This rounds up as a high-end platform for tests with modern-day SSDs.

First up, we have the official performance stats for these drives as listed by their manufacturers. You can compare these stats with the rest of the drives I tested in the following chart:

AS SSD Benchmark download is a Windows 10 utility software program that tests the performance of solid-state drives. With its help, you can find out the speed of all installed SSDs and take care of any issues that the tests may reveal. The free app performs three separate tests to provide you with conclusive evidence of your driver's general behavior while it copies, reads, and writes data.  The app determines the access time of an SSD, along with its speed and performance capabilities

As the industry’s leading provider of high-performance storage & network connectivity products, ATTO has created a widely-accepted Disk Benchmark freeware software to help measure storage system performance. As one of the top tools utilized in the industry, Disk Benchmark identifies performance in hard drives, solid-state drives, RAID arrays as well as the host connection to attached storage. Top drive manufacturers, like Hitachi, build and test every drive using the ATTO Disk Benchmark.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host bus adapters (HBAs), hard drives, and SSD drives, and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software. It measures sequential reads/writes speed, random 512KB, 4KB, 4KB (Queue Depth=32) reads/writes speed, selects test data (Random, 0Fill, 1Fill),

To test the maximum average transfer speeds of the drives, I used a 100 GB file to test the limits.

The PCMark 10 Storage benchmark is designed to test the performance of SSDs, HDDs, and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, and a selection of popular games. You can test the system drive or any other recognized storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 10 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices.

The Netac NV7000 lineup has seen a lot of updates, we last tested their NV7000-T TLC SSD which is a great deal for the value and performance it has on offer, and with the NV7000-Q QLC SSD, Netac comes close to TLC performance which does stand out in a few benchmarks but there's only so much that QLC can achieve.

The performance for an average user is going to be great, if you are loading games or casually using your PC for standard work and browsing, the NV7000-q is a fast SSD. It's only instances that involve the handling of larger file sizes where this SSD is going to take a hit. Another thing on the plus side is the temperatures. Without a heatsink, you are still going to get read speeds of up to 7100 MB/s while running at temperatures below 50C which is something we hope to see one day with mainstream Gen5 controllers. Maxio is working on that so hopefully that day is closer than we think.

In terms of pricing, the Netac NV7000-Q is expected to retail at around $80 US which puts it right there with the NV7000-t which can be found at Amazon for under $80 US. At this pricing, the 'T' variant is the obvious choice to get so it will be interesting to see how Netac goes by in pricing the "Q" variant for the US market where it might end up competing with its products. With that said, I think the NV7000-Q has the potential to become a good-value SSD for mainstream users.

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