ORICO GV100 NVMe SSD – flash drive in your pocket

The ORICO GV100 is a USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 3D NAND NVMe SSD flash drive that comes in 128/256/512GB and 1TB is coming soon.

To put that in plain English the ORICO GV100 is a bloody big (well it is quite small), bloody fast (if you have USB 3.1 gen 2) flash drive made for sucking up files. It uses SSD grade flash memory instead of slower and lower-cost eMMC flash.

Review: ORICO GV1000 512GB

• Company website here
• Amazon AU site here
• Price: 128/256/512GB and 1TB $99/139.99/299.99 includes free delivery
• Warranty: 3-year warranty via Amazon (practically 200TBW)
• Country of manufacture: China
• ORICO is a well-known and respected Chinese manufacturer of peripherals and digital accessories. It has a focus on storage, USB adapters and chargers

ORICO GV100 basic specs

• 64-layer 3D TLC NAND
• Interface USB-C 3.1 (or 3.2) Gen 2 10Gbps UASP – other interfaces will reduce speed
• JMicron JMS583 USB 3.1 Gen 2 to PCIe Gen 3x 2 lane bridge
• Internal M.2 2242 standard SSD
• 20cm USB-C to USB-C cable and USB-A to USB-C cable included
• 96 x 30 x 9.9mm x 28g (plus choice of USB cable)
• Blue or Black Aluminium alloy cover and ABS plastic chassis and lanyard ring
• Works with Windows, Mac, iOS, Android (OTG), PS4, Xbox etc
• Sleep mode after 10 minutes of no activity

Tests

The maximum speed is 10Gbps which is 1250MB per second. USB-C has overheads so to get over 1000Mbps sequential read is frankly amazing.

We used a variety of devices

• Microsoft Surface Pro 7 USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 – EXCEED 1069.85/808.52MBps
• *HP x360 Spectre Thunderbolt 3 – EXCEED 1067.9/974.91MBps*
• Microsoft Surface Go 2 USB-C 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gbps) – EXCEED 455.75/441.26MBps
• **Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G USB-C 3.0 (5Gbps half-duplex) – EXCEED 291.54/262.91MBps

* It would not work on either of the two HP Spectre Thunderbolt 3 ports. The readings are from its USB-A port.

** Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra requires a reformat to exFAT. That is fine.

Now external SSDs don’t have a cache (a bucket of high-speed RAM or SLC cache) to even out data transfers. That is why they slow down as the file size increases. This drive is excellent at copying larger files. The ATTO disk test shows gigabyte speeds for a file size of 256MB.

Issues

The HP Spectre Thunderbolt 3 compatibility issue relate to the use of the JMS583 Bridge. It is a known issue and means it works, or it does not. We also tried via a Plugable Thunderbolt dock, and it achieved the same speeds as the USB-A direct connect.

GadgetGuy’s take – ORICO GV100 is a speedster

The test unit is 512GB – a larger capacity than most SSD hard drives. It is fast – not as fast as an internal PCIe NVMe 4-lane SSD that should reach 2,000MBps or more but its at least twice fast as any SATA external backup.

In essence, it is an M2.2242 PCIe NVMe SSD drive with a USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 bridge. Its unique feature – it is quite small but in reality it competes with a large number of external M.2 enclosures (usually about $50) that you can add an SSD drive.

It is also directly competing with  Samsung T7 (1TB $275 – 4.8/5),  WD Black P50 (4.7/5) or SanDisk Extreme Pro ($260 – 4.8/5)

As it can have issues on Thunderbolt 3, it loses some points. For USB-C 3.1 Gen 2, it is a very fast drive.