INTRODUCTION
PCIe M.2 NVMe SSDs pushed storage far beyond the limits of mechanical drives, with each generation multiplying bandwidth and shrinking load times. PCIe Gen3 established NVMe as the mainstream standard—reliable, cool‑running, and still perfectly adequate for everyday workloads. PCIe Gen4 doubled the available bandwidth, delivering noticeably faster game loading, smoother content‑creation pipelines, and stronger sustained transfers without demanding exotic cooling. PCIe Gen5 SSDs raised the ceiling again, offering massive throughput for high‑end systems, workstation‑level transfers, and next‑generation game engines. Initially that jump came with trade‑offs, higher thermals, mandatory heatsinks, stricter motherboard compatibility, and real‑world gains that vary depending on workload. Today most thermal related concerns have been resolved and so Gen5 drives bring undeniable advantages, blistering sequential speeds, improved parallelism, and headroom for future software and DirectStorage‑heavy titles. The M560 is the latest Gen5 model released by BIWIN and that's what I've been testing for a while now.
For decades, BIWIN Storage Technology has made the critical storage and memory in many of the leading digital devices that have defined our digital world. The Biwin consumer brand offers the best of BIWIN’s experience, a range of SSDs, DRAM, memory cards and related accessories that will help you get the most out of your devices. Biwin, Built to Win. For more about Biwin, please visit www.biwintech.com
The new M560 line of Gen5 M.2 NVMe SSDs by BIWIN currently includes only two capacities (1/2TB) both of which are based on the latest SM2504XTF DRAM-less flash controller by Silicon Motion which this time is paired with 218-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory (BiCS 8) by Kioxia. The SM2504XTF is an 6nm, 4-channel NAND flash controller (tri-core Arm Cortex-R8 processor) with a speed of up to 3600MT/s per channel (16CE) that follows the NVMe 2.0 (Non-Volatile Memory Express) standard and packs technologies like NANDXtend 4K+ LDPC engine with end-to-end data path protection, SRAM ECC & CRC parity, real time AES 256-bit encryption, Host Memory Buffer (HMB) architecture (uses a fraction of your PC's system memory to cache mapping tables), ONFI 5.1 and Toggle 5.0 support and TCG Opal 2.0 compliance. Moving to warranty BIWIN covers the entire 560 Gen5 M.2 NVMe SSD line with a 5-year limited one and as for durability they report an MTBF (mean time between failures) of 1.5 million hours and TBW (terra bytes written) of 750/1500 for the 1/2TB models respectively.
