Our reviewer tests a $3 SATA SSD, and gets exactly what he paid for

Zoom in / The 120GB SSD in question.

As we’ve detailed here at Ars before, there are some not-so-obvious SSDs being sold online. They tempt the unsuspecting with rock-bottom prices, but in the end, all we’re guaranteed is disappointing speeds. Well, you might not even get solid-state storage, as a common scam is passing off microSD cards as cheap SSDs. So what can you expect to get from selling a 120GB SATA SSD for $3?

Storage review I had a great trip testing a $3 SSD from AliExpress (The link is just to show the product list. Don’t buy this SSD of course). The Goldenfir-branded SSD was reportedly delivered to the storage location by a Discord user for testing.

Real SSD

The good news is that Goldenfir actually uses an SSD controller for its NAND drive. The controller is Yeestor YS9083XT which is a Chinese company Announce As a SATA3.2 controller in 2019. And based on the screenshots shared by the site, it has the advertised capacity.

However, it is clear that these drives cannot offer performance close to that of a modern, regular-priced drive. Ars does not recommend storing valuable data on a drive of an unfamiliar brand. StorageReview also noted the drive’s cheap plastic body. AliExpress lists supported operating systems as limited to: “Windows XP/7/2003/2008, DOS, Linux, and Unix.”

However, StorageReview argued that in some very specialized situations, the drives could be used, such as “for temporary and non-critical storage or for educational purposes to teach someone about how SSDs work without risking more expensive hardware,” Lyle said. , StorageReview staff writer. Smith wrote in condition Published Wednesday. He added that he does not recommend these components as operating system drives. Other potential uses listed include temporary projects or rock skipping.

But for most people, a $3 SSD only serves to remind us that there’s a lot of junk being sold online.

$3 SSD tested

StorageReview tested the drive by placing it in a Lenovo SR635 1U server with an AMD Epyc 7742 processor and 512GB of DDR4-3200 RAM.

StorageReview also decided, “unfairly,” to pit it against Kingston’s DC600M enterprise SATA drive. You can guess what happens next. You can also check out StorageReview’s full video detailing its findings below:

Using a 64GB file and the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, StorageReview reported that “the Kingston drive finished the entire test ahead of this piece of shit.” [the $3 drive] She can even build her own test.”

With the VDBench workload benchmark filling out the entire drive, the $3 drive hit a wall at around 15,500 IOPS when running the 4K random read test, compared to the Kingston drive’s around 80,000. The cheap SSD eventually finished the test at 13,000 IOPS and 10,225 ms, compared to 78,000 IOPS and 1,630 ms on Kingston.

It was a similar story with random 4K writes. In a StorageReview video, StorageReview editor-in-chief Brian Beeler said the SD card would have beaten the $3 SSD here and emphasized the cheap drive’s “awful” 140ms response time.

Smith wrote:

The Kingston engine resembles a Rolls-Royce, while the Goldenfir resembles a questionable car that a shady car dealer might push on an unexpected buyer.

As you may have guessed, the Goldenfir drive showed similar behavior with StorageReview’s 64KB sequential read and write tests, showing a 50ms response time during the last test.

After these tests, StorageReview turned to CrystalDiskMark to see how the drive handled things like trim commands and garbage collection since it had gone through some writes. However, the publication reported that the drive was running at just 5.2MB per second, which is so slow that it is “barely measurable.”

Beller added:

When we consider this performance, you would be better off buying a cheap USB drive, which is a SATA DOM [Disk on Module]Turn off the SD or MicroSD card. Do whatever you want, but don’t buy this drive.

Goldenfir also sells an $8 NVMe drive on AliExpress, and StorageReview had a similar experience testing that drive, it noted in its article on Wednesday.

Note that we can’t fully confirm StorageReview’s testing for ourselves because we weren’t there, but StorageReview live-streamed its testing on YoutubeWhich is the next best thing: