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 everyone doesn't know is that unless your SSD has ad Ram cache built into it like this one for example it can actually end up being slower than a mechanical hard disk so that's why in the past we've always avoided those $20.00 SSDs until now meet the fad heed of racing 120 gig SSD we purchased this sucker for 20 bucks so who's the sucker this sucker or this sucker we're gonna find out after this message from our sponsor ruggable with ruggable you can protect your floors from your computer chair they're machine washable and they'll stay in place with a non-slip pad use code LTT 15 to get 15% off your order and free shipping at the link below [Music] I know it shouldn't matter but whenever I see really terrible branding like to the point where you'd have had to be a child or an idiot to think that it makes any sense it really does decrease my confidence in the finished product you know why is there an overweight bird on the blocks for 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 through the specs here this is a two and a half inch drive with a an apparent 128 megabytes of DRAM cache this is from the Amazon listing the verbage though is lifted straight from the Wikipedia entry for other solid-state drives so it says DRAM based and cash on buffer but the thing is the only other SSDs that we've seen at this price point are DRAM --less used or renewed and as far as I can tell this thing is totally brand new in box so we also have this that came in the package Oh service policy thank you for purchase of our items we're so glad that you selected us in our products yeah for a five-year limited warranty love you Dave you got a SATA cable that is actually a pretty good bonus most drives don't include a SATA cable anymore so we need our data and our power and is this just gonna boot right up for me Anthony uh if you press the power button yeah well yeah minor details you don't need to debate it is this just a sticker sure is so if the stickers on it yet plus three years of warranty I don't know sudden power off recovery that to me indicates that it would have a capacitor on it like like an enterprise SSD that's what it sounds like you can't possibly have that also I love this sentence right here thank you for selecting us good luck so first test is what just initializing it yeah we need to initialize it new simple volume well the capacity is as advertised now there's some more problems here this says serial ata revision 2 point-six but it also says it's SATA 6 gigabits per second and it said that on the drive as well yeah so apparently it doesn't even support trim and is SATA 2 according well depending on which spec you believe well we'll know soon enough because crystal disk mark will tell us exactly what kind of sequential speeds we can expect from this thing you know in some ways this like Rando cheap hardware is far more interesting than the stuff from manufacturers that are reputable enough that you can trust what they say yeah ok never know you're gonna get look at that so it's say 2 3 6 gigabit per second even though there's information right on the box that would indicate that it's not what they put a dev on their packaging so how can we rely on them to know exactly what's in the box if they clearly had no idea what they were doing on the outside of it out of the gate I'm actually kind of impressed I mean saturating the SATA 3 6 gig per second interface has not been a feat for years and years at this point but the thing is this is only a 120 gig SSD so what's weird about that is that you know how higher capacities of a given SSD tend to be rated for more performance the reason for that is that to get those higher capacities in some cases they'll put more NAND flash chips onto the PCB which means that you get to take advantage of more parallelization as you're writing to the flash and reading from it boosting your performance well it's been years since 120 gig SSDs have made any sense to make because the capacities of the individual NAND flash chips have become so high that in order to even build a 120 gig SSD you'd only need like one chip on there and the performance would absolutely suck unless it's fine okay so the Enigma deepens then what did you have in mind for us next Anthony uh well we could do the file copy test but I did create some tests specifically for this in Linux okay so I should restart yep all right so okay hit me pop open two terminals and we'll run some scripts that I made su do dot slash disk test alright so that women that is the wanderin let me guess SD yeah it does a security race first and now it's doing continuous looping of one gigabyte right and then one gigabyte read okay and then it tells us what the latency is after a thousand writes of average well I took a lot longer already well it's going up oh boy we went from two point three seconds to seven seconds already the reads are still pretty consistent but the writes have skyrocketed oh this is TLC okay that's fair alright so the other one do sudo file copy ah what I swear to god the way that whatsapp sends you in constant notifications that you're logged out - P space mount and hit enter that all looks correct and that'll show us then over here what our sequential read and writes look like and as well as especially the right latency got it so that'll tell us how effective that D Ram cache is as well as how effective the amande is at being erased this is interesting so the read test is still taking about the same amount of time it was at the start but we're getting spikes in the right test where it's jumping up to over 15 seconds we just finished our first run of the sequential file copy test and it's getting warm now and this is interesting the read test is no longer finishing consistently in just two seconds it's actually drawn almost level with the right test which has gone down the right latency though has gone up pretty significantly quintuple or as much as 8x it's all over the place okay does it have a tear I'm cat no don't tell me we'll find out after so now one well now we can graph those results but we could also throw on one of our beer amla's SSDs oh let's see that that makes a difference okay so reboot yeah we do want to look at that output first yeah you want to look at the output first thank you did you really build that into this benchmark I built many things into the benchmark that you have not seen yet that moment when your program is like 90 percent easter eggs 10 percent copying files back and forth what how do i shut it down same way you just gonna leave leave why is it called leave I mean that's almost as stupid as windows being start to turn it off so just the same commands again same commands again so we'll start with the a data drive that is I want to say similar and then I can start this one yeah okay let's see what happens now this product page is just gonna be lies right do you want to look at it we've got some time I'm pretty sure most of this has lifted either from Wikipedia or with like reviews or other unrelated SSDs single-level cell cache technology I don't think so oh definitely not SLC hasn't been around even in the enterprise for many years there's even conflicting information here it takes 10 seconds from the start to the desktop fatty dub to 40 gig solid-state drive starts up in about 15 seconds they're this far away from each other optical storage read speed what what are you even talking about do we have a result here no not just yet but I'm pretty sure this is a dear unless SSD wait it actually might not be this a data is doing even worse wait no better in latency for the most part but the actual test completion times are much worse that actually would make some sense if the fatty dub only has a couple of chips in it thankfully fatty dove is more resistant to shock and vibrations can fly but like not quite fly it just sort of like fall slowly you know like it's just like a chicken yeah yeah chickens can do that have you ever thrown a chicken no fun fact 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 the chicken away and we raised it and it nice and big and then one day we had to give it back for reasons did your parents make you eat it though no it was because that's what happened with my pet goat Oh run three finished Wow 250 seconds by the last run here this one got absolutely creamed alright then okay point two fatty dove I guess control Oh I mean four throughput yeah beating the worst is not exactly an achievement so round two this one right here should I just start ripping this thing open do you want to avoid that warranty oh yeah open wow that's sticker stop you're done oh and it's been you bet your fatty dove yeah Wow that is that is not a lot of PCB tell me something Anthony are you finding this up for the first time or did you have one of these open already I did not have one of these open already I should have gotten one and opened one but this is actually very fascinating to me right now now I have seen SSDs that have taken a similar approach with a full size two and a half inch enclosure and I've actually seen ones that are like as small as just right here okay so based on looking at the back of the PCB I'd say that's our controller right there and I'm guessing no D Ram cache cuz it looks like there's just one chip right there oh it does have a D Ram cache it's right here no way so that seems to be a silicon motion controller we're gonna have to check this Samsung part number to find out if the 128 Meg cache is correct and then as we discussed there is in fact only a single NAND flash chip on this PCB but based on how far flash has come in the last few years I guess you can get adequate enough performance for a SATA SSD out of just a single chip which I guess kind of makes sense because you know max capacity and vme drive is only gonna have four chips on it with a lot of the high performance ones having just two so SATA is like fracks that speed wow I'm impressed okay let's find out how much cash it actually has them oh this benchmark is done and the micron SSD is definitely better but not necessarily because it has a D Ram cache probably just because it's got better engineered firmware in a better controller okay I want to I want to check these part numbers now I think that's the name B Ram chip ddr3 sdram one gigabit okay so 128 Meg's surprisingly then as broken as the packaging and product page were the main controversial element of this thing whether or not it had a dram cache ended up being true although with that said the power loss protection did not end up being present there's no bank of capacitors here that looks anything like that so that that is clearly not accurate why why would they say that is it to do with the fact that compared to our hard drive you don't worry about if you lose power the head parking oh or it could be that they mean that compared to something like just a dram drive the data is held persistently right right maybe it's like volatile yeah non non-volatile storage I don't know I don't know what they're going after there but for 20 bucks yeah can't can't speak to that but hey five-year warranty right it's making five year warranties I've got a five year warranty on this Segway which is why I keep using it our video is brought to you by PIAA adding a VPN to your connection masks your IP and encrypts the traffic to and from your devices private internet access has reliable service with over 3000 servers in 32 countries they've got no bandwidth caps so whatever it is you're trying to keep your internet service provider from snooping on hey they have got you covered there you can download and upload as much as you want they've got configurable encryption and an internet kill switch which means that as soon as your VPN disconnects all traffic stops so that nothing will sneak out you can check it out today at the link in the video description we're gonna have an affiliate URL right down there so thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this little adventure in exploring weird cheap we're off of Aliexpress then maybe check out our Oh our Show and Tell where everyone bought the weirdest hardware they could possibly find and then seed who had seats off who had whatever it was weird go check it out thank bluff

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,786,744

Rating: 4.9223881 out of 5

Keywords: ssd, storage, solid state, disk, drive, laptop, desktop, 2.5, 2.5 inch, cheap, performance, benchmarks, DRAM, cache, TLC, capacity, NAND, SATA, serial ATA, linux, windows

Id: mnk6gnOBYIo

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Dragon20C]

I wish they made even more videos there is so much content about Linux they can do!

[u/IIWild-HuntII]

Off topic , I have been using KDE since 10 days now after trying Xfce and Ubuntu Gnome , the best Linux experience I have seen.

[u/wamred]

I was wondering which OS it was. That is awesome!

[u/ritmofish]

what's the command he ran?

[u/therealjackbuilder]

they have another video with manjaro where they made a hackintosh with it

[u/Red_The_IT_Guy]

The power of the linux console.

[u/riyadhelalami]

That isn't a new drive, have you watched drauga1