INTRODUCTION

    Even though gaming handhelds were never my thing there's quite a significant percentage of gamers all over the world that does and for them a new dilemma has appeared, what M.2 2230 SSD to choose. The lack of space is a double edged sword since on one hand choosing a 2230 sized M.2 is a lot easier (limited number so far) while on the other such drives simply can't compete with 2280 M.2 ones, both in terms of performance and capacities. Roughly a full year ago Acer (BIWIN) released their very own 2230 M.2 SSD called the MA200 and today I'll be testing the 1TB capacity model.

    Acer branded storage products are designed and manufactured by BIWIN Storage Technology company, a leading maker of quality flash memory, DRAM memory and solid-state drives (SSD storage devices). Founded in 2010, BIWIN focuses on providing global customers with high-quality storage products and specializes in the research, development, manufacturing and sales of memory chip application products.

    The MA200 is available in two capacities (512GB/1TB) and is based on the quad-channel DRAM-less SM2269XTF PCIe 4.0 Gen 4 (NVMe v1.4) NAND flash controller by Silicon Motion which BIWIN has paired with Micron's 176-Layer 3D TLC (B47R) NAND flash (up to 5200MB/s reads - 4700MB/s writes for the 1TB model). The Silicon Motion SM2269XTF DRAM-less controller has been used many times in the past and features technologies like 4K LDPC error-correction (ECC), RAID, TRIM, SMART, device sleep (power management), garbage collection and real-time AES-128/256bit encryption (TCG Opal 2.0 compliant). Moving to endurance numbers BIWIN reports an MTBF (meantime between failures) of 1.5 million hours for both drives, 300TBW for the 512GB model, 600TBW for the 1TB model and as for warranty both are covered with 5-year limited one.