Orico IG740-Pro SSD review: An okay performer with cool extras

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I’ve long tracked and tested Orico’s drive enclosures to good effect, but this is my first encounter with an SSD from company. It proved to be a more-than-capable NVMe drive, and as affordable as the competition. All in all, it’s a welcome addition to the market.

Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best SSDs for comparison.

What are the Orico IG740-Pro’s features?

The IG740-Pro is a PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe M.2, 2280 (22mm wide, 80mm long) SSD. The controller is a Maxio MAP1602A and the NAND is 232–layer 3D TLC.

Orico warrantees the IG740-Pro for the usual five years, and the usual 600TBW per 1TB of capacity. If you write more than 600TB within the five years, the drive could go read-only. Most vendors rate their SSDs’ TBW (terabytes that can be written) far more conservatively than they’re actually capable of lasting. It’s a liability thing.

Orico thoughtfully includes a slightly beefier heat spreader with a thermal compound strip, as well as a screwdriver and even a retaining screw for installing the drive should you need them. These are very nice touches — the screw especially, as they are small and can be easy to lose.

How much is the Orico IG740-Pro?

The Orico IG740 Pro is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities for $71, $135, and $240, respectively. That’s roughly on par for a host memory buffer TLC SSD.

How fast is the Orico IG740-Pro?

The IG740-Pro is hardly a barn burner, but it’s not half-bad considering the price. That’s my laid-back way of saying it’s more than fast enough, but not near the top of the heap. It was the 5th fastest PCIe 4.0 host memory buffer drive overall, but 29th among all the NVMe SSDs we’ve tested.

I stacked the IG740-Pro up against some pretty heady PCIe 4.0/HMB competition in the charts by way of the WD Black SN7100, Teamgroup MP44Q, and the uber-affordable Kingston NV3. You can see its CrystalDiskMark sequential performance numbers directly below. It largely held its own.

Host memory buffer SSDs tend to have significantly slower random operations, but the Orico IG740-Pro was particularly far off the pace. It’s not the optimal drive for running your operating system (which performs myriad small file ops).

Two minutes, nine seconds is a good aggregate time for the Orico IG740-Pro, if not the fastest we’ve seen from an HMB design. Note that host memory buffer drives tend to do very well in our real-world transfers.

The Orico IG740-Pro slowed from around 3GBps to 2GBps around the 75 percent point in the 450GB write, hence it lagged slightly behind the competition.

Note that the drop to 2GBps was not the drive writing natively. When that occurs (well beyond 450GB — which you’ll likely never see) the write rate actually hovers between 500MBps and 750MBps. The image below was a second consecutive 450GB write without giving the IG740-Pro time to reconstitute secondary cache.

Note also that the Teamgroup MP44Q is a QLC (Quad-Level Cell/4-bit) drive, so when you exceed its secondary cache, the write rate drops off a cliff to around 100MBps.

Should you buy the Orico IG740 Pro?

While the Orico IG740’s performance performance is strictly median for its class, in truth all NVMe SSDs are really, really fast. Call this another “pick’-em based on what drives are cheaper at the moment.” A solid effort from Orico.

How we test

Our storage tests currently utilize Windows 11 (22H2) 64-bit running on a Z790 (PCIe 5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 modules (64GB of memory total). Intel integrated graphics are used. The 48GB transfer tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk taking up 58GB of the 64GB total memory. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, which also contains the operating system.

Each test is performed on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that as any drive fills up, performance will decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, and other factors.

The performance numb