As we have detailed right here at Ars earlier than, there are some sketchy SSDs bought on-line. They tempt the unsuspecting with supremely low costs, however in the long run, all you are assured is disappointing speeds. Heck, you won’t even get solid-state storage—one in style rip-off passes off microSD playing cards as low-cost SSDs. So what are you able to count on to get from a 120GB SATA SSD promoting for $3?
StorageReview went via the exceptional journey of testing a $3 SSD from AliExpress (linking solely to point out the product itemizing. Do not buy this SSD, after all). The Goldenfir-brand SSD was reportedly given to the storage website by certainly one of its Discord customers for testing.
An actual SSD
The excellent news is that Goldenfir is definitely utilizing an SSD controller for its NAND drive. The controller is a Yeestor YS9083XT, which the Chinese language firm introduced as a SATA3.2 controller in 2019. And primarily based on screenshots shared by the location, it has the marketed capacicity.
Nonetheless, these drives clearly cannot provide wherever close to the efficiency of a contemporary, normal-priced drive. Ars would not advocate storing valued knowledge on a drive from an unfamiliar model. StorageReview additionally famous the drive’s cheap-feeling, plastic chassis. And AliExpress lists supported working techniques as being restricted to: “Home windows XP / 7 / 2003 / 2008, DOS, Linux, and Unix.”
Nonetheless, StorageReview argued that in some very particular area of interest conditions, the drives might have use, resembling for “non permanent, non-critical storage or for instructional functions to show somebody about how SSDs work with out risking costlier {hardware},” StorageReview employees author Lyle Smith wrote in an article revealed Wednesday. He added that he would not advocate these parts as OS drives. Different potential makes use of listed included non permanent tasks or rock-skipping.
However for most individuals, a $3 SSD solely serves to remind us that there is quite a lot of junk bought on-line.
A $3 SSD, examined
StorageReview examined the drive by placing it right into a Lenovo SR635 1U server with an AMD Epyc 7742 processor and 512GB of DDR4-3200 RAM.
StorageReview additionally determined to, admittedly “unfairly,” put it up towards Kingston’s DC600M entry-level enterprise SATA drive. You possibly can guess what occurs subsequent. You too can take a look at StorageReview’s full video detailing its findings beneath:
$3 SSD
With a 64GB file and the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, StorageReview reported that the “Kingston drive completed your complete take a look at earlier than this piece of turd [the $3 drive] might even construct its take a look at.”
With the VDBench workload benchmark filling up your complete drive, the $3 drive hit a wall at round 15,500 IOPS when working the 4K random learn take a look at, in comparison with the Kingston drive’s roughly 80,000. A budget SSD finally completed the take a look at at 13,000 IOPS and 10,225 ms, in comparison with the Kingston’s 78,000 IOPS and 1,630 ms.
It was the same story with 4K random writes. In StorageReview’s video, Brian Beeler, StorageReview editor-in-chief, stated an SD card might have beat the $3 SSD right here and emphasised a budget drive’s “terrible” 140 ms latency time.
Smith wrote:
The Kingston drive appears just like the Rolls-Royce, whereas the Goldenfir is akin to a questionable automobile a shady automotive seller may push on an unsuspecting purchaser.
As you may need guessed, the Goldenfir drive confirmed related habits with StorageReview’s 64K sequential learn and write checks, displaying 50 ms latency in the course of the latter.
After these checks, StorageReview went to CrystalDiskMark to see how the drive would deal with issues like trimming instructions and rubbish assortment because it had gone via just a few writes. Nonetheless, the publication reported that the drive was solely going at 5.2MBps, which was so sluggish that it was “barely even measurable.”
Beeler added:
After we take into consideration this efficiency, you would be higher off shopping for an inexpensive USB drive, a SATA DOM [Disk on Module]boot off an SD card or a MicroSD. Do something you need, however don’t purchase this drive.
Goldenfir additionally sells an $8 NVMe drive on AliExpress, and StorageReview had the same expertise testing that drive, because it famous in its article Wednesday.
Word that we will not totally verify StorageReview’s testing for ourselves since we weren’t there, however StorageReview livestreamed its testing on YouTube, which is the following smartest thing:
$3 SSD testing
