The TINY 1TB SSD

this is a full-fledged nvme SSD suitable for use in medium performance applications like in a notebook computer it's got a whopping 1 terabyte of capacity and comes from a company most of you won't have heard of called Kiyoshi a-- but at this size can it possibly be any good or should I be expecting performance kind of like when I tried to run Windows on an SD card you'll find out after this message from our sponsor Ridge wallet Ridge wallet wants to redefine the wallet with this compact frame and RFID blocking inner plates check out how they can keep wallet bulge down for you and use offer code line is to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping [Music] backbone SSDs started to really take off for consumers it took loads of NAND dies in order to reach capacities that would be considered I mean even back then enough for a boot drive that holds your operating system and some key performance sensitive applications this drive from 2010 uses a whopping this double-sided 16 chips each with just 4 gigs of capacity to reach its 120 gigs advertised capacity once you account for some spare area for wear leveling to improve its lifespan now you could actually get one terabyte SSD is back then but it was very unusual the OCZ colossus series was actually available in up to one terabyte capacities in 2010 but was one of the only SSDs I'm aware of to have ever shipped in a three and a half inch form factor yes my friends it was the size of a hard drive had not one but two in the links controllers each with their own separate D round caches and like this one it was covered front and back with NAND flash packages except that it was a much bigger PCB massive shout-out by the way too hot hardware for still having these images of a drive from a decade ago up on their site there's almost no other real evidence of these things ever existing in the wild probably because the one terabyte LT version would have set you back about four thousand dollars according to this article from ZDNet and also my own memory because I was actually the OCZ product manager at NCIX back when they launched that thing that is a lot to spend on a high-capacity drive that's going to be horribly bottlenecked by a SATA 2 interface so who the heck is Kiyoshi a-- and how do they figure into all this I'm glad you asked Oh cz was acquired by Toshiba back in 2013 Toshiba memory corporation was spun off in 2018 and then became Toshiba memory Holdings Corporation in 2019 which was renamed you guessed it yoke SIA so the BG 4 is not just some weird Aliexpress no-name SSD this is actually their current generation business to business low power consumption solid-state drive for small form-factor systems and you might very well have one of these in your laptop if you bought it in the last little while without even knowing it unlike older SSDs there's not actually a lot for us to disassemble here so I'm just gonna take off the sticker wonder if it's like a thermal sticker wow it actually does appear to have some kind of a thermal backing on it or something that can't possibly help oh there it is MDOT to interface bigger PCB and a single package mounted to one side now let's compare the bg4 is anatomy to a couple more typical drives here's the interfaces okay no problems so far here's the controller on our typical drive so this takes the incoming data and spreads it across all the different NAND packages so that none of them are worn out more than the others which improves drive endurance it also keeps track of where all the data is and it spits it out back to you when you request it that is in here and then most modern high-performance drives also have let's see if I can find it yes here we are ad Ram cache so the Kiyoshi ax b g4 doesn't actually have one of those because yogya is using a different approach to this typically for acceptable performance an SSD needs that high-speed DRAM onboard which actually gets wiped every time it loses power what it does is it holds a lookup table so that the controller pitch again is that one in the middle here knows where to find all the data that's been scattered around across the NAND flash in order to make it last longer now you can live without it some controller architectures like notably this one or just cheaper ones don't use a D Ram cache but in most cases performance suffers sometimes to the point where a poorly designed deer analyst SSD can be slower than a mechanical hard drive at least that's the case when we're talking about more conventional SATA interface drugs nvme version 1.2 introduced a feature called the nvme host memory buffer it actually lets an SSD that's attached to the system via PCI Express do some of that mapping in system memory now this would never work over SATA because the interface is just too slow but over PCI Express it seems like drives that use this feature can cache at least some of that napping like at least for the most frequently accessed data in the system memory and make up some of that performance so that is what's going on here enough chitchat let's put our thermal sticker back on as if that's gonna do anything and go ahead and install this puppy interesting this thing is actually only 3 centimeters long so you look at it compared to the typical 80 centimeter form factor and it's like it's laughable what's not funny is that I don't really have a way of installing it on the board directly I grabbed an asus hyper m dot 2x4 that also doesn't have the thing but i have one more option oh look at that the dim dot too so that's that little thing you can stick in what looks like a memory slot on some isus boards actually has a 30 millimeter mounting hole that's gonna make it so we can't really see it though okay new plan ok so we just need to kind of stick that there to anchor it during testing the key osya actually did pretty respectably for a system integrator SSD we got sequential read speeds of around 2 gigabytes per second and writes well in excess of a gigabyte with tame right Layton sees that rarely pushed beyond one millisecond and our single threaded dual file copy and sequential performance tests riveting where it's tumbled was when it we hit it with four simultaneous file copies where sequential speeds dipped dangerously close to hard drive territory after 10 minutes due to its lack of cooling and internal gear and cache but it never gets bad obviously peak speeds are way better on our beefy PCI Express 4.0 Corsair MP 600 but it's worth noting that it too begins to stumble around the 10-minute mark under our 4 file copy load in some cases coming down as far as the key oak sia though it only ever broke a millisecond and right latency once those extra NAND chips to the key oak cs1 allow more channels to be active at once and ends better performance but that's a pretty heavy workload and so if I to say with the lighter work one of these will find in a daily driver you'd be hard for us to find any difference whatsoever and that's what we saw in PC markcaswell well that's pretty impressive definitely a darn sight better than the Colossus from back in the day and what's really cool is that anon Tech actually measured some of the best power consumption that they had ever seen on this thing so given that it's performance is fine better than SATA at least at a cost that manages to be cheaper than SATA and at a size that is small enough to make systems like this one even more compact in the future I'd say it's pretty sweet but also not terribly compelling for the vast majority of consumers for whom this is already really small and not difficult to fit in their computer which would probably explain why keoki I didn't bother making a retail version of the BG 4 the only way to get one of these this time is to buy a computer that happens to have one pre-installed in it by the manufacturer as for why I bothered making a video about it then honestly speaking I just thought it was really cool I mean come on it's an SSD the size of like my thumbnail you don't think that's cool no else is cool Squarespace do you think making your website is hard well it doesn't have to be use Squarespace and you'll have your website up and running in a matter of hours maybe even faster than that they have award-winning templates to help your site stand out instead of looking like it's from the 90s and if you're interested in how your websites doing they have built-in tools to help you find out what you're doing right and perhaps more importantly what you're doing wrong Linus Media Group and LTX expo websites were built quickly using Squarespace and if you get stuck they have a 24/7 support team that's ready to help you out head to squarespace.com slash ltte and you can get 10% off today so thanks for watching if you guys are looking for another fun and interesting thing that's related what the heck could be related to this how about the other end of the performance spectrum new onyx server was 24 nvme rise yeah that's a good one

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,625,735

Rating: 4.9404511 out of 5

Keywords: kioxia, ssd, performance, small, form, factor, laptop

Id: IbYG7q9OO18

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2020