Chinese Brand SSDs - opinions?

[scaryjim]

OK Hexus hive-mind, I'm hoping you can give me a bit of advice here!

I'm looking at grabbing a small M.2 SSD for my new laptop - I don't think I'll need more than 128GB for the OS + recovery partition.

A quick peruse of Amazon has turned up a number of appropriate options, but all by Chinese brands that are relatively unknown to me.

So, does anyone have any opinions or knowledge of any of KingSpec, TCSUNBOW, or Dogfish, to help me decide what to do!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Well a mate and I have been considering the Kingspec 360GB one,since it has gone as low as £58 recently.

However,SSDs are as much about reliability,and the problem is unlike an HDD they can go kaput instantly and some of the Chinese ones apparently can be a hit and miss especially with support. This is why after my experience with the Sandisk ones,and seeing quite a few people around me have an SSD go from 100% to suddenly going kaput,its better to just spend a bit extra on a decentish SSD. Its fine to get a cheapo one if its a secondary drive for an online game,etc but as a boot drive get a reasonable one. Even that old Kingston from the the Hexus competition still works!!

[Mr_Jon]

I've bought two products from Drevo. First was a mechanical keyboard, and I was so impressed with it I went for a cheap SSD of theirs for my dad's laptop. They do the M2 SSDs also, but haven't had any experience with them.

[Bagnaj97]

Well a mate and I have been considering the Kingspec 360GB one,since it has gone as low as £58 recently.

They've gone as low as £51. Apparently a lot of the cheap chinese SSDs don't have a dram buffer, which, given current RAM prices, could explain some of the cheapness. As a result they're much slower than the big brand SSDs, but still substantially faster than HDDs.

[RaTTuS]

you pays your money and takes your chances...
I've used kingspec before now ....

if it's down to a few pounds go with something you can swap back if / when it fails ....

[Firejack]

The WD Green 120GB M.2 SATA SSD is £36.03 at the moment. Seems pretty good value.

https://www.ebuyer.com/821724-wd-gre...sd-wds120g2g0b

[scaryjim]

The WD Green 120GB M.2 SATA SSD is £36.03 at the moment. ...

I had that in my basket, but since it's under £50 I'd have to pay about another £4 for slow delivery, which cuts the value proposition quite a lot. I've got a Prime trial at the minute, so ideally I'll buy from Amazon with free next day delivery...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I had that in my basket, but since it's under £50 I'd have to pay about another £4 for slow delivery, which cuts the value proposition quite a lot. I've got a Prime trial at the minute, so ideally I'll buy from Amazon with free next day delivery...

This AData one is NVMe:

https://www.cclonline.com/product/24...Drive/SSD0676/
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11969...x2-up-to-1-gbs

ADATA has launched its new 3D TLC-based SSD, the XPG SX6000. The new drive is among the first in the industry to use Realtek’s RTS5760 controller. The manufacturer positions the XPG SX6000 SSD as an entry-level enthusiast-class PCIe x2 solution that will be affordable but will offer higher performance than the drives featuring the SATA interface.

Apparently it has some DRAM onboard according to Anandtech and has a 5 year warranty.

WD is cheaper here including postage:

http://www.morecomputers.com/p/?pid=...estern+Digital

However,as you should have free Scan postage:

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/120g...545mb-s-retail
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/240g...545mb-s-retail

The WD SSDs seem to be essentially rebadged Sandisk drives:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/10748...-wd-green-ssds

The WD Green SSD is an entry-level product line with limited capacity options. Based on the SanDisk SSD Plus, it uses a Silicon Motion controller in a DRAM-less configuration with SanDisk 15nm TLC NAND. The WD Green has a similar purpose to drives like the Samsung 750 EVO and the recently-announced OCZ TL100: to offer the lowest possible price while still providing acceptable reliability and a noticeable performance jump over hard drives. Higher capacities are omitted from the product line because the total price would be too high for the most cost-sensitive consumers even if the price per GB is marginally lower than a more mainstream budget drive.

While the Green label has connotations of better than average power efficiency when applied to WD's hard drives, the low performance of DRAM-less SSDs usually leads to poor energy efficiency during active use and the idle power savings tend to be minimal.

The WD Green will be available later this quarter, and pricing has not been announced.

[scaryjim]

This AData one is NVMe:

https://www.cclonline.com/product/24...Drive/SSD0676/...

Oooh, good spot CAT - I'd been looking at the same drive on Amazon but it's a fiver cheaper at CCL! We may have a winner

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Oooh, good spot CAT - I'd been looking at the same drive on Amazon but it's a fiver cheaper at CCL! We may have a winner

Here is a review of the 128GB model from Phoronix under Linux:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...g-sx6000&num=1

[Spreadie]

The WD Green 120GB M.2 SATA SSD is £36.03 at the moment. Seems pretty good value.

https://www.ebuyer.com/821724-wd-gre...sd-wds120g2g0b

I've been looking at that WD m.2 drive for a few days, and the concerning thing about it is even WD's official spec sheet doesn't mention the write speed - leading me to think it is severely gimped.

[Saracen]

For me, Cat's first post nailed it .... risk versus cost difference. Some unknown Chinese brands can be very good but still cheap, while others are cheap for a reason.

With my data at risk, is it worth taking a chance? Personally no, but of course, YMMV.

[scaryjim]

... With my data at risk, is it worth taking a chance? Personally no, but of course, YMMV.

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.

[DanceswithUnix]

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

That doesn't look any faster than a SATA drive though. The 256GB drive is faster, less than twice the price and has free shipping. TBH I would be tempted by that one, but then I always found the idea of a Windows "boot drive" never quite worked for me in practice.

OTOH, I have never tried Intel's drive caching system, for that it might work well (and you wouldn't be risking data with a cheapo brand SSD as it is all on the HDD).

[scaryjim]

That doesn't look any faster than a SATA drive though. ...

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?).

OTOH, I have never tried Intel's drive caching system, for that it might work well (and you wouldn't be risking data with a cheapo brand SSD as it is all on the HDD).

Yeah, I was pondering an Optane drive since the laptop supports all of the RST technologies, but I'll probably just clone the OS onto the SSD to free up the HDD for bulk storage and program installs.

Anyway, I've pulled the trigger on the 128GB ADATA from CCL. Thanks for all the input though guys

[RaTTuS]

For me, Cat's first post nailed it .... risk versus cost difference. Some unknown Chinese brands can be very good but still cheap, while others are cheap for a reason.

With my data at risk, is it worth taking a chance? Personally no, but of course, YMMV.

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