Introduction
One of the last stops that we made at CES 2023 was to visit BIWIN’s suite to find out a bit more information about them and to finally sort out what the deal is with the Acer Predator and HP products that they have been selling in the US market. Of note, we’ve previously reviewed the Acer Predator GM7000 2TB SSD and it did well in our tests.
Who is BIWIN?
BIWIN has been around for several decades and prides itself on being one of the few manufacturers to do its own IC packaging and testing, enabling them to purchase raw wafers and cut them to their specifications. They have built a healthy book of business doing custom work for to integrate with other products – you need 512mb of flash storage to shoehorn in to the corner of your fancy gadget? No problem, they can make it for you.
HP SSD and Memory Products
About five years ago, BIWIN first got into the consumer sales business by picking up a license to manufacture DRAM and SSDs under HP’s brand name. Thus, the HP memory (not plentiful here in the US) and the SSDs that you’ve seen on the market with HP’s branding have been produced by BIWIN under license.
Acer Predator SSD and Memory Products
About two years ago, BIWIN acquired a license to manufacture DRAM and SSDs under the Acer Predator brand name. Much like the HP agreement, all of the DRAM and SSDs you see in the retail channels under Acer’s Predator brand are manufactured by BIWIN under that license. Interestingly enough, the Acer Predator PCs do NOT utilize the BIWIN products.
One of the more interesting things that we got to take a peek at was the upcoming Acer GM7 SSD, which Brent currently has cooking on his test bench. The GM7 is trying to be a more power efficient drive while still delivering nearly all the performance of the GM7000. Logically, it will be positioned at a more cost effective price point. We’ll have our review of it up in the coming weeks.
Conclusion
While this is not our typical writeup, it’s one that I think is helpful as there are not very many of these licensing arrangements in the enthusiast PC parts market and this should give some clarity related to the relationship between BIWIN, HP and Acer.
Discussion (1 reply)
Join Discussion →Interesting.
I actually have an old BIWIN M.2 SATA drive in my pfSense router.
It's a 60GB unit. One of these.
pfSense only uses like 4GB of the disk, and isnt disk intensive, so I didn't want to waste money on more SSD than I needed. I considered using a 8GB DOM or something like that, but those actually wound up costing more than this thing did.
I essentially bought it only because it was the smallest and cheapest SSD (that would fit in an m.2 slot or as a DOM, I didn't want a SATA drive with a power connector to worry about) on either Amazon or Newegg at the time of purchase in 2017.
It cost me ~$40 back in 2017, so I was happy it kept the costs down. It takes a little long to boot, but that doesn't bother me too much, and anyway, that might just be a pfSense thing and not a Biwin thing. Since then I have a spare 256GB Inland premium m.2 drive kicking around. If I have the spare time some day, I may just install that instead, and see if it speeds up the boots at all.
Smart is still reporting it at 100% life remaining, 6 years later, but I'm not sure if I trust the output, because at the same time it only says that there are 500113 LBA's written (244MB) on a drive that has 4GB of data on it. It also only claims to have 1464 power on hours (61 days), but has been in near 24/7 use since 2017 :p
Hopefully their newer, more capable and pricier drives are better in this regard :p
To be fair to this drive, it has been in use 24/7 for almost 6 years now, which means it is doing orders of magnitude better than every OCZ drive I ever owned :p