So, sitting on my desk, there is a black and orange mystery box with the words "Performance Redefined" and "Asura" written in bold text. I don’t know much of the company other than what’s found on their website such as they're a startup from Chino, CA founded last September (2018). But after taking a look inside the box, I'm more than curious to see just how well their Genesis XTreme 1TB SSD handles for all my computing and gaming needs!
The Genesis XTreme is the latest in SSD technology superseding the current standard SATA bus by directly connecting to a PCIe slot on the motherboard. One of the first things I noticed is the 4 piece heat sink that doubles as an LED diffuser; I'm familiar with the amount of heat that these little drives generate as I already have one in the home server. But I'm glad and surprised Asura proactively took steps to ensure their product's performance and durability plus taking the hassle out of having to find a heat sink that fits. If your motherboard doesn’t accept the Genesis XTreme with the heat sink, then grab a small screwdriver and it will come apart. You'll not have to worry as it will still function properly and within tolerances. Asura makes this drive available in four capacities: 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB. I will be working on the 1TB and this model has a Read speed of 3500 MB/s and Write speed of 3000 MB/s which is more than 4-5 faster times than my current SSD performance.
To begin my journey with the Genesis XTreme, I went with a fresh installed of Windows 10; if you've ever done it from a regular Disk drive to an SSD, you will notice a difference in speed as the install time drops tremendously; I remember with an HDD being able to go make a cup of coffee and toast and it wouldn't be close to finishing up. The first time with an SSD I had enough time to go to grab a drink and it was almost finished. This time around, with the Genesis XTreme, the install was finished before I could lift my ass off the chair. OK, that might have been a bit "extreme", but it goes to show just how fast the process was. Of course, rebooting my PC happened within a blink of an eye.
Next up, I got to play with some software with the Genesis XTreme, namely Call of Duty: WWII and Plex. I also dabbled with some content creation, mostly for digital signage but not enough to be considered any good. So, I'll leave that to the pros like Valkor. But I do like to watch a lot of movies and I've been using Plex for my purchased digital 4k content. And working with the Genesis XTreme was a major improvement over my previous SSD when streaming media; I ran with Avengers: Infinity War 4K because it’s awesome. I streamed it through Chromecast, which required it to be trans-coded from 4K to a low end 1080p. When using a standard SSD, I would skip ahead and normally I'd have to wait 8-10 seconds for the film to buffer and catch up. But with the Genesis XTreme, it was a significant improvement as it would only take about 1-2 seconds to make the jump. Also, initial play and the way the database was pulled up was significantly faster as there is no longer a delay on how the saved image and movie info is drawn.
After the Thanos snap, I decided to move onto gaming with a couple of my favorites Diablo 3 and Call of Duty: WWII and as soon as I hit the icon for WWII I was at the boot screen ready to play. Keep in mind that prior to this I was using a standard SSD but the performance of how fast the data was being retrieved with the Genesis XTreme was completely night and day; I noticed that during a single player mode how seamless the game switched from cutscenes to the gameplay. During multi-player, I noticed I was up and ready to go a good 6 seconds before my friends. I also picked up on a big time difference with Diablo 3 as I played alongside my son and some friends in Greater Rifts; We all had the same latency and equipment but when we moved from one floor to the next I was already loaded and dealing with mobs while they were just coming in through the portal. Now going back to Call of duty WWII, I decided to try something a little different to test out how well it would it handle the read and write locally and from my LAN party. I do this on occasion with different games for my son and his friends. So I went ahead and created two virtual machines - one was a host server and the other a separate client to play on while my son and friends played on LAN. Booting up both virtual machines at the same time was as expected very fast. And then transferring 41GB to both VM drives took about 30 seconds. On the host, the server is where I was impressed by how fast the data was compiled for the gaming environment, what normally takes 10 minutes took 2 minutes. It’s amazing how one device can breathe a little fire into an average gaming machine.
I can definitely say that the Asura Genesis XTreme SSD is worth the investment as it will do a lot to improve your day to day computer usage from boot up to transcoding to gaming and so much more. I was really impressed with the transcoding end of it because my machine takes a beating when it goes from 4K to 1080p and the speed of the drive really made a big difference in how fast things played. The Asura Genesis XTreme is made with a prosumer in mind giving one the ability to work on large objects with a shorter wait time. Overall, out of TOV 5 stars, I'm giving Asura Genesis XTreme SSD a perfect 5 out of TOV 5 stars.
