How bad is this $20 SSD??

Everyone knows that compared to a hard drive, an SSD is a great way to speed up your system, but what not everyone knows is that unless your SSD has a built-in memory cache like

this

, for example, may end up being slower. than a mechanical hard drive, that's why in the past we have always avoided those 20 SSDs until now, we came across the fat pigeon racing 120 gig SSD. We bought

this

sucker for 20 bucks, so who is the sucker, this sucker or this sucker? I know I shouldn't mind, but every time I see really terrible brand names, to the point where you'd have to be a child or an idiot to think it makes any sense, it really diminishes my confidence in the finished product.

Do you know why people are overweight? bird in the box of this package what is it about this that screams racing? I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows. We're all just guessing, so let's talk about the specs here. This is a two and a half inch drive with apparently 128MB of dram cache, this comes from the Amazon listing. The verbiage though is taken directly from the Wikipedia entry for other solid state drives, so it says dram based and buffered cache, but the problem is the only other SSDs we've seen. At this price they are used or refurbished without drama and as far as I can tell this is brand new in the box so we also have this that came in the package.

Oh, service policy. Thank you for purchasing our items. We are very happy that you selected us on our products, we offer a five year limited warranty, love it, we have a sata cable which is actually a pretty good bonus, most units no longer include a sata cable so We need our data and our energy, and this is just it? It will boot right up for me, Anthony, uh, if you press the power button, yeah, yeah, minor details, uh, you don't need to press F8, wait, this is just a sticker, it sure is, with the stickers you have you get plus two years warranty.

I don't know about the sudden recovery from shutdown, that to me indicates it would have a capacitor like an enterprise SSD. That's what you can't seem to have. I also love this phrase. Thank you for selecting us. Good luck. so the first test is just initialize it, yes we need to initialize it on a new simple volume, well the capacity is as advertised. Now there are a few more issues here, this says revision serial ata 2.6 but it also says it's sata six gigabits per second and it says that on the drive too, yeah apparently it doesn't even support trimming and is set to two depending on which spec you think , we'll find out soon because the mark on the crystal disc will tell us exactly what kind of sequential speeds we can expect.

From this you know that somehow this cheap, random hardware is a lot more interesting than stuff from manufacturers that are reputable enough that you can trust what they say, yeah okay, you never know what. You're going to see it, so it's sata. three six gigabits per second even though there is information directly on the box that would indicate that is not what they put on the package, so how can we trust them to know exactly what is in the box if they clearly had no idea what were? doing it on the outside from the start, I'm actually a little impressed, I mean, saturating the sata3 interface with 6 gigs per second has been no mean feat for years and years at this point, but the thing is, this is just an ssd 120 gigabytes.

So the strange thing about this is that you know how the higher capacities of a given SSD tend to be rated for higher performance. The reason is that to get those higher capacities, in some cases they will put more nand flash chips on the PCB, which means you can take advantage of greater parallelization as you write to and read from the flash, increasing your performance. . It's been years since 120gig SSDs made any sense because the capabilities of individual nand flash chips have become so high that to build even a 120gig SSD you would only need one chip on there and the performance would be absolutely abysmal unless okay, so the riddle deepens, so what did you have in mind for us next, Anthony?

Well, we could do the file copy test, but I created some tests specifically for this on Linux, okay, so I should reboot, yeah, okay, then, okay, come on, open two terminals and we'll run some scripts that I made . sudo dot slash disk test, all good. so that's the 11 gig SSD, yeah, first it does a safety run, now it's doing a continuous loop of one gigabyte right and then one gigabyte reads fine and then it tells us what the latency is after a thousand average writes, oh , that took. much more already, oh it's going up, oh boy we went from 2.3 seconds to seven seconds, the readings are still pretty consistent, but the rights have skyrocketed, well this is tlc, okay, okay, so the other one, um, make the sudo file, copy what I I swear to God the way WhatsApp sends you constant notifications that you're offline, dash p space mount and press enter, everything looks correct and that will show us here how you see our sequential reads and writes and also especially We got the latency right, so that's going to tell us how effective the dram cache is and how effective the nand erase is.

This is interesting, so the read test is still taking about the same amount of time as at the beginning, but we are getting spikes on the correct test where it jumps to over 15 seconds. We just finished our first run of the sequential file copy test and now it's heating up and this is interesting, the read test no longer consistently finishes in just two seconds. It's actually almost at the level of the correct test, which has lowered the correct latency, although it has increased significantly fivefold or up to 8 times, it's all over the place, okay, do you have a dramatic cat?

No, don't tell me we'll find it. Well now we can plot those results, but we can also add one of our SSDs from our dram list, oh let's see if that makes a difference, okay, so reboot, yeah, wait, do you want to see that result first, yeah ? you wanted to see the result first oh yes ltdstar.com oh thanks did you actually incorporate that into this benchmark? I built a lot of things in the benchmark that you haven't seen yet at that point where your program is like ninety percent Easter eggs and ten percent. copying files back and forth oh my god Anthony how do I turn it off the same way?

You're just going to leave, leave, why is it called leaving. I mean, that's almost as stupid as Windows starting to shut it down, so just the same commands again. Same commands again, so we'll start with a data unit, I mean, I mean similar and then I can start with this one. Yeah, okay, let's see what happens now. This product page is going to be a lie. Do you want to see it? I mean we have some time. I'm pretty sure most of this is taken from Wikipedia or similar reviews of other unrelated SSD single-level cell cache technologies.

I don't think so, definitely not. Slc has not even existed. In the company for many years, there is even conflicting information here, so it takes 10 seconds from boot to desktop, called a 240 gig solid state drive, which boots in about 15 seconds. They are so far from each other. Optical storage. Reading speed. That? Are you even talking about whether we have a result here? No, not yet, but not yet, but ssd wait, actually it may not be this. The data is performing even worse. Wait, there is no better latency for the most part, but the actual test completion times are. much worse, that would actually make sense if the fat dub only has a couple of chips, fortunately the fat pigeon is more resistant to shock and vibrations it can fly, but it doesn't fly at all, it just falls slowly, you know, I think it's I just eat a chicken, yes, yes, chickens can do that, have you ever thrown away a chicken?

No wonder, I actually had a pet chicken when I was a kid. Me too, the chicken was the one that all the other chickens picked on, yeah, so we took it. and we raised it and it became cute and big and then one day we had to give it back for reasons did your parents force you to eat it? Although no, it was because that's what happened with my pet goat, oh, run three, it ended, wow, 250 seconds for the last time you ran here, this one got absolutely cremated, so okay, aim for the greasy dubbing, I guess what control, well I mean performance, yeah, beating the worst isn't exactly an achievement, so round two, uh, this one here, should I start opening this thing? you want to bypass that warranty oh yeah open wow that sticker stops you're done oh and it's bent you bent your fat pigeon yeah nonsense wow that's it that's not much PCB tell me something anthony are you discovering this for the first time? once or already had one of these open.

I didn't have one of these open. I should have gotten one and opened one, but this is actually very fascinating to me right now. I've seen SSDs that have taken a similar approach with a full size two and a half inch enclosure and I've actually seen some that are as small as here, well based on looking at the back of the PCB I'd say that's our controller right there and I guess not. dram cache because it looks like there's only one chip right there oh it has a dram cache it's in here no way so it looks like it's a silicon motion controller.

We'll have to check this Samsung part number to find out if the 128 megs of cache is correct and then as we discussed, there is in fact only one nand flash chip on this PCB, but based on how far flash has come in the last few years, I guess you can get enough performance for a sata SSD with just a single chip, which I guess makes sense because you know a full capacity nvme drive will only have four chips and many of the high performance ones will only have two, so what sata is like a fraction of that speed.

I'm impressed okay let's find out how much cash it actually has although oh this benchmark is already done and the micron ssd is definitely better but not necessarily because it has a dram cache probably just because it has better designed firmware and a best controller okay I want to I want to check these part numbers now I think it's a gigabit ddr3 sdram round chip okay so 128 megs surprisingly as broken as the packaging and product page were the main item controversial of this, whether or not it had a finished dram cache. being true, although that being said, power loss protection did not end up being present, there is no capacitor bank here that looks like that, so it is clearly not accurate, why would they say it has to do with the fact of what in comparison? our hard drive doesn't have to worry if it loses power, the head stalls, oh, or it could be that they mean that compared to something like just a stick of RAM, the data is kept persistently, right, maybe it is as volatile, yes, no. non-volatile storage, I don't know, I don't know what they were looking for there, but for 20 bucks it's actually not bad, I don't know about the longevity, but yeah, I can't speak to that, but hey, five year warranty, right? ?

So thanks for watching guys, if you enjoyed this little adventure exploring weird, cheap hardware on aliexpress, then maybe watch our show and say where you all bought the weirdest hardware you could find and then see who had seats and who had whatever . It was strange, see the link below.