Addlink G55 SSD review: More budget PCIe 5.0 love

If you’re looking for nearly-unparalleled performance and chart-topping power efficiency, the Addlink G55 is certainly worth a look. New hardware helps push this SSD to levels once unthinkable for a “budget” drive, although there are some caveats. Price is certainly the biggest one, but sometimes you have to pay for cutting-edge technology. The era of PCIe 5.0 drives that don’t require active or even passive cooling is here, and that’s a good thing for storage enthusiasts everywhere. The G55 helps usher that in, although you can still get a heatsink with the G55H if that’s your thing.

Addlink has done a good job of surprising us with its SSDs in recent times. Earlier this year we looked at the NAS D60, a drive with power loss protection and enterprise TLC flash that’s tailor-made for NAS use and is ready to go for server workloads. Last year, we reviewed the excellent A93, a budget drive with many similarities to the G55, including having a similar optional heatsink. Addlink caps off this good run with an entry-level PCIe 5.0 SSD, which sounds a little ridiculous — and, at this time, it is — but the G55 does deliver the goods.

The goods in this case refer to the drive’s excellent all-around performance and record-breaking power efficiency. Gone are the days of needing a heatsink to cool a 12W PCIe 5.0 SSD. You can throw the G55 into a laptop and, even if it’s being used in a 4.0 slot, it’s going to give you excellent performance with low power draw. We already saw this recently with the Corsair MP700 Elite, with the G55 standing out from that drive by having lower street prices and a promised 4TB SKU. It remains to be seen where prices will end up on these drives, but for the time being you do pay a decent premium for the courtesy of running cutting-edge SSD hardware.

The Phison E31T controller used in these drives is ostensibly a budget solution. The “T” suffix means there’s no DRAM cache, which reduces cost and can boost power efficiency. That should make the drives less expensive as well, but while these newcomers do undercut the existing Phison E26 PCIe 5.0 drives, it’s not by much. At the same time, paying more than you would for a good PCIe 4.0 drive makes sense, considering the potential boost in performance. 

Addlink G55 Specifications

The Addlink G55, or G55H with a heatsink, launched at 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. 4TB is a higher capacity than what we saw with the Phison E31T ES preview and in our Corsair MP700 Elite review. The possibility for 4TB was always there, but it’s up to the manufacturers to actually get those models to market. This can be somewhat challenging as there is dependence on Phison and flash makers to support this higher capacity with a cutting-edge drive like this.

At the time of review, we could not find a 4TB G55 or G55H, but the 1TB and 2TB models were going for $115.44 / $116.44 and $195.44 / $197.44. This is substantially less expensive than the MP700 Elite’s MSRPs but still significantly higher than many good PCIe 4.0 SSDs. The 2TB Crucial T500 is only $151.99, which is generally a much better deal. Prices will have to come down more on the E31T, but at least your options are expanding.

The G55 can achieve up to 10,3000 / 9,000 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1,300K / 1,500K random read and write IOPS. This is incredibly high for a DRAM-less drive with a four-channel controller. It doesn’t saturate the PCIe 5.0 link, but it’s almost as fast and powerful as original E26-based drives like the Corsair MP700 Pro. That’s pretty impressive. Addlink supports the drive with a five-year warranty at up to 600TB of writes per TB capacity.

Addlink G55 Software and Accessories

Addlink does offer its own SSD toolbox for download, which has the basic functionality you would expect. It’s useful for checking drive health with SMART sensor information and the application can also be used to securely erase the drive. There are many ways to safely format an SSD, but using the toolbox may be the most direct way. We recommend the free CrystalDiskMark for benchmarking, CrystalDiskInfo for checking drive health data, and Clonezilla for your backup and imaging needs.

 Addlink G55: A Closer Look

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Addlink sent us the G55 version of the drive, along with a separate heatsink that turns it into the G55H. We did run some thermal tests with the G55H, but otherwise we expect performance to be identical (within the normal margin of error). From what we can tell, the G55H comes with the heatsink unattached, so you can use it or not, as you please.

It’s refreshing to see the company not charging obscene amounts for an inexpensive heatsink, so the extra dollar or two for the G55H to get the extra flexibility seems like the better option for most people. The heatsink itself is not much to write home about but should be enough to keep the drive from throttling in any environment where that condition might be a risk. That’s assuming you have space for the added height (thickness) that the heatsink requires. It would fit just fine in a PS5, while it’s doubtful most laptops could support the extra couple of millimeters.

The 2TB drive is single-sided — a bonus for compatibility and cooling — and should be single-sided at 4TB, too, even with just two NAND flash packages. It should be possible to orient four packages on one side or to do at least two per side, but the default layout of the E31T drives we’ve seen favors just two on top. This might be why we haven’t seen any 4TB models out in the wild yet. That configuration could also see higher pricing, which means that sticking with a budget 4TB PCIe 4.0 SSD makes more sense if you’re going for just one drive for games and storage.

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Here we see the standard layout with the DRAM-less Phison E31T SSD controller and two NAND flash packages, as well as the Phison PMIC for power management. Each package is 1TB using eight 1Tb, 218-Layer BiCS8 TLC flash dies. There’s not much to this drive and that’s a good thing — this is an elegant, low-power design that superficially doesn’t look like much. However, it packs a punch, as we will soon see.

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