What makes this drive particularly interesting is its current $69 price (about £55/AU$100), which is relatively low nowadays for a drive of this caliber.
However, when writing lots of data to the O7000 (like if you’re moving all your game installations to it), its performance easily bogs down and becomes extremely slow.
The O7000 1TB also has a weakness in that other brands offer the same SSD hardware under different names, and these drives can sometimes be cheaper, but sales pricing is always a fickle thing.
For now, though, the O7000 is the cheapest option for this hardware, and its performance makes it one of the best values in PCIe 4.0 storage.
Orico O7000: Price & availability
(Image credit: Future / Matthew Connatser)
How much does it cost? From $69 (about £55/AU$100)When is it out? Available nowWhere can you get it? Available in the US, with UK and Australia availability pending
The O7000 is currently available on Amazon and Newegg, though at the time of writing, Amazon only offers the 1TB model, while Newegg also has the 2TB and 4TB variants in stock. The 1TB model costs $59, the 2TB $93, and the 4TB $196. The 2TB is currently the best deal on a dollar per GB basis, but since SSD prices can easily go up or down, it’s unclear how long this will be true for.
At $59 for the 1TB model, it’s significantly cheaper than other flagship PCIe 4.0 drives like Seagate’s FireCuda 530R and Corsair’s MP600 Pro NH, which cost $94 and $84 respectively for the 1TB version. It’s also much cheaper than older PCIe 5.0 SSDs, such as the $169 FireCuda 540 1TB.
Orico O7000: Specs
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Rated Sequential Read Speed (MB/s) Row 0 – Cell 1 Up to 7,000
Rated Sequential Write Speed (MB/s) Row 1 – Cell 1 Up to 6,500
Interface Row 2 – Cell 1 M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0
NAND Row 3 – Cell 1 YMTC TLC
Controller Row 4 – Cell 1 MaxioTech
DRAM Row 5 – Cell 1 Host memory buffer
Available Capacities Row 6 – Cell 1 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB
Endurance (TBW) Row 7 – Cell 1 Up to 1200 (4TB)
Orico O7000: Performance
(Image credit: Future / Matthew Connatser)
Overall, the O7000 shows good, but not perfect, performance. The 530R and MP600 Pro NH were faster for the most part, but in nearly every single test the O7000 nipped on their heels. There were even a few instances where the O7000 tied or beat the Seagate and Corsair drives.
A particularly bright spot for the O7000 is its thermal performance and efficiency. It only maxed out at 50 degrees Celsius, far lower than the three other SSDs we tested. That makes the O7000 a decent candidate for laptops and handheld PCs, which often lack good SSD cooling.
Of course, more heat occurs because of higher power consumption, so the O7000 is a low-power drive too, another reason to choose it for a battery-powered device.
The FireCuda 540 was of course in its own league, but it costs about twice as much and benefits from active cooling, something the O7000 definitely doesn’t need.
However, the O7000’s biggest weakness is in sustained writes. All SSDs suffer from lowered writing performance the less free space they have, but the O7000 can see its performance drop to as low as 150MB/s. However, it’s rare to come across this situation in the real world since it requires tens or hundreds of gigabytes of large files being moved to an SSD.
Orico O7000: Verdict
(Image credit: Future / Matthew Connatser)
While the O7000 1TB isn’t perfect, its overall performance is very close to what you get with the FireCuda 530R 2TB and MP600 Pro NH 2TB. With a substantially lower price tag of $69, that makes the O7000 a better deal for the most part. If you’re looking for a new boot drive on a budget or if you just want some fast, secondary storage, the O7000 is a sensible choice.
However, the SSD that the O7000 1TB is based on is also made by other brands, including TeamGroup with its MP44. There’s really no reason to buy the more expensive drive since they’re essentially identical, but that works in Orico’s favor right now since the O7000 is cheaper.
The O7000 2TB is an especially good deal right now, going for just $93, which isn’t much more than lots of 1TB drives. Spending the extra $34 to get double the storage and the same performance makes the O7000 2TB especially appealing versus the 1TB model, though we don’t know how long this will hold since SSD prices can change quite frequently (and have done so as this review was in progress).
Should you buy the Orico O7000
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Orico O7000 Scorecard
Category
Notes
Score
Value Hard to find a drive with better bang for buck today
5 / 5
Design & Features Typical warranty and endurance, comes with a heatsink you don’t need
4 / 5
Performance Great all-around for a PCIe 4.0 drive except in sustained writes
4 / 5
Final Score The O7000 would be the perfect PCIe 4.0 SSD if it weren’t for its sustained writing speed, which thankfully isn’t too important
4.5 / 5
Buy the Orico O7000 if…
Don’t buy it if…
How I tested the Orico O7000 Although Intel ’s new Core Ultra 200 Series has technically replaced last-gen 14th Gen CPUs, I’m using my LGA 1700 test bench for SSD testing, rather than an LGA 1851 test bench.
This is because SSDs run on Arrow Lake CPUs actually perform significantly worse than on 14th Gen CPUs. We’re not entirely sure why this is the case, but in order to show our SSDs’ best possible performance, we have to use Intel’s last-gen CPUs.
The LGA 1700 test bench is equipped with the Core i9-14900K, ASRock’s Z790 Taichi Lite motherboard, 32GB of DDR5 clocked to 5600MHz, and Corsair’s H170i iCUE LINK liquid cooler with a 420mm radiator. We also tested the Firecuda 530R, Firecuda 540, and MP600 Pro NH for comparison.
