Asura Genesis Xtreme SSD Review: Speedy NVMe With RBG Bling

Now that SSDs and their components have been substantially cost-reduced and essentially gone mainstream, there are more and more players in the space. What was once a market reserved for but a few top-tier semiconductor manufacturers, is now increasingly crowded by new, lesser-known third-party companies looking to capitalize on the increasing demand for super-fast storage. One such company is Asura Technology. Asura was founded less than a year ago, and has developed a high-end, NVMe SSD with a handful of interesting features, targeted specifically at gamers and performance enthusiasts -- the Asura Genesis Xtreme we will showing you here today.

Asura Technology does not have their own proprietary controller or NAND to develop a totally unique product in-house, but rather has partnered with storage industry veterans like Phison and Toshiba (among others) to assemble the Genesis Xtreme. And what Asura has created turned out to be a speedy device, with a couple of stand-out features. Take a look...

Find The Asura Genesis Xtreme @ Amazon

The Asura Genesis Xtreme uses the M.2 2280 form factor common to most of today’s enthusiast-class SSDs, but out of the box its configuration is somewhat unique. You see, Asura has outfitted the drive with a removable dual heatsink / heatplate assembly (affixed by a couple of tiny screws), top and bottom, in addition to a stylized light diffuser, visible at the center of the drive and along both sides.

What’s the light diffuser for, you ask? Well, it’s there to evenly spread RGB lighting around the drive, of course. The Asura Genesis Xtreme is one of only a few SSDs to feature RGB lighting built-in. The lighting on the drive rotates in a rainbow pattern, similar to some the RGB-enabled memory kits currently on the market.

At its core, the Asura Genesis Xtreme is an NVMe 1.3, PCIe Gen 3 X4 M.2 SSD built around the Phison PS5012-E12 controller (8-channel), 64-Layer Toshiba 3D BiCS3 TLC NAND flash memory, and some SKHynix DDR4 DRAM cache. Those components make for a potent SSD that’s rated for up to 3.5GB/s reads with 3GB/s writes, and a 1655TBW endurance rating.

The Asura Genesis Xtreme also supports all of the modern amenities you’d expect from a high-end SSD today, like ECC, TRIM, SMART, Thermal Protection, Automatic Garbage Collection, Bad Block Management, etc. And although the company hasn’t been around long enough to be a known entity, it is trying to assure consumers of the quality of its drives, by offering a long, 7-year warranty.

Worth taking a shot on a relatively new-comer in the storage space? Let’s see what performance looks like and consider all of the variables...