Aura Pro X SSDs: Performance Notes

Created on: May 5, 2022

Relevant Part Numbers:

• OWCS3DAPB4MB02
• OWCS3DAPB4MB05
• OWCS3DAPB4MB10
• OWCS3DAPB4MB20

Please note that in circumstances where customers are pushing their Aura Pro X SSD to its performance limits — for example, when encoding high resolution video for an extended period of time or handling very large file transfers — they may experience an issue where the read and/or write speeds drop off dramatically. This is due to the architecture of the drive and occurs for one of two reasons:

• The flash controller will use some of the onboard flash memory in SLC mode during write operations, in order to boost write performance.  When the flash being used for this purpose is exhausted, the write operations on the drive slow down significantly. It is not uncommon to see write speeds around 300MB/s for a time, until the flash memory is released and able to be used again.
  
  
• These drives are also temperature-controlled. If the the controller approaches its designed thermal limits, it will throttle the drive's performance — at times as low as 50-60MB/s for reads and writes — until the components cool down to safe levels, at which point normal performance levels should resume. IMPORTANT: many times, this behavior is triggered because the customer did not remove the plastic liner from the thermal pad, prior to installation.
  
  

Additional resources related to use of thermal pads on our drives: https://confluence.macsales.com/x/2K7n