Chinese Brand SSDs - opinions?

[DanceswithUnix]

It's a bit faster on sequential, theoretically, but it's the IOPS writes (110k+) that looks impressive to me (perhaps I'm just out of date with my impression of what a SATA SSD can do though?).

The stats are good compared to SATA, but not in a different league.

I would really be tempted to try the caching tech with that drive though. That is a pretty big cache, should make booting very fast and avoid the whole aggro of a Windows re-install.

[scaryjim]

... I would really be tempted to try the caching tech with that drive though. That is a pretty big cache, should make booting very fast and avoid the whole aggro of a Windows re-install.

Windows reinstall wouldn't be necessary - I have appropriate drive-cloning software that can handle partition resizing etc.

One thing I've noticed is that you can choose how much SSD to use as a cache, and have some spare storage space left over - not sure if there's any real value to that though. Maybe I could reserve some of the drive for project files when I'm working on audio processing ... that's pretty IO intensive ...

And I suppose ultimately I could always try the caching then - if I decide it's not helping enough - disable it and clone the OS onto the SSD anyway. The big test will be next time I get a big OS update - it was a feature update behind out of the box and it took absolutely forever to install, with the disk being thrashed to high heaven. I'd forgotten just how noisy a HDD can get in a laptop...!

EDIT for crosspost:

https://www.cclonline.com/product/24...Drive/SSD0676/ faster [though not msata]..

That's the drive that CAT linked, and I've now bought

[Spreadie]

I wouldn't be keen on sharing an ssd between caching and storage duties.

[RaTTuS]

W...

That's the drive that CAT linked, and I've now bought

dang got myself confused by the other options there .... must be my age and eyes or something

[Saracen]

In this case, there wouldn't be much data - the SSD would be for the OS install and very little else, on a personal machine that holds no critical data at all (plus there's already a 1TB spinning rust disc that I'd keep for all my applications/games/data/etc.). That's one of the reasons I was considering a cheapo SSD in the first place

But ultimately I think being able to get PCIe (even at x2) at a reasonable price point probably settles it for me.

On the first para, understood, and agreed. It's the kind of thing I had in mind by "YMMV".

[Bagnaj97]

I've finally cracked and just ordered a KingSpec 360GB SSD. With the AliExpress anniversary sale and a coupon it cost me the princely sum of £45.60, that's a very cheap 12.67p/GB.

When it eventually turns up I'll post some benches - I'm not expecting it to compete with the latest SSDs, but it should still destroy mechanical drives. I've still got my first SSD kicking about, a G.Skill Falcon 60GB, which is a rebadged OCZ Vertex and limited to Sata 2, so it'll be interesting to see how that compares.

Aside from performance the other worry with these Chinese drives (or any drives!) is longevity - time will tell on that front but it's just going to be a game drive to boost loading speeds, so if it fails I won't lose anything I can't re-download from Battle.net/Steam/Origin.

[ERU]

Good luck Bagnaj97 - I hope it pays off!

I've been a bit more conservative and bought the Adata XPG SX6000 128GB M.2-2280 SSD. I'll report back in a week or two with some comments on it.

[DanceswithUnix]

I guess the worry is that you end up with a counterfit drive like this:

http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-ne...-flash-memory/

The brand "Kingfast" still makes me smile after all these years, such a brilliant name

[Bagnaj97]

I guess the worry is that you end up with a counterfit drive like this:

http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-ne...-flash-memory/

The brand "Kingfast" still makes me smile after all these years, such a brilliant name

That was an interesting read and is part of the risk. Personally it doesn't worry me for my use case - at the end of the day even the counterfeit SSD was comparably fast with compressible data, and with incompressible data it was still much faster than a hard drive. This drive won't be for critical data, just games, and I keep backups of anything irreplaceable. At the end of the day even "good" components fail - my 480GB Sandisk Ultra II died without warning (RMA replacement still going strong).

The only things that worry me are fake capacity or this kind of situation:

[DanceswithUnix]

That picture. Wow. Just wow!

[ERU]

Adata XPG SX6000 256GB M.2-2280 SSD @£70.13 is installed: