Kingspec Q-360 360GB SSD mini-review

[Bagnaj97]

I received my Kingspec Q-360 from AliExpress today, it was a bit of a gamble as there's virtually no information about this drive online and it was dirt cheap compared to the big brands (I paid £45.60). The padded envelope was sealed with Kingspec Electronics branded tape, so maybe it's direct from the factory? Box and packaging were basic but sufficient, alongside the SSD there were 4 mounting screws. The drive itself is 7mm thick, so it should fit everything with a 2.5" bay. First up I ran H2Testw to ensure it was the claimed capacity (335GB after NTFS formatting) and everything checked out. Next I benchmarked the drive with AS SSD and CrystalDiskInfo, and I benched my Sandisk Ultra II 480GB for comparison

AS SSD results:




I'd say it's pretty comparable to my Sandisk Ultra II in terms of performance, although the Sandisk is my OS drive so that may have had a performance impact. The 512b test on the Sandisk spat an error at me, so the read result is missing and the write result may be incorrect.

CrystalDiskMark results:



Again, somewhat comparable scores. The Kingspec seems better for writes than the Sandisk, but worse for read speeds.

I can't comment on the reliability of the drive, but so far everything looks good. At 12.67p/GB, providing it's reliable, it's incredibly good value. It's not the fastest drive going, but it's certainly no slouch either!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I might be tempted to get one for these to run a few games off,if they go under £50 again.

[Bagnaj97]

I might be tempted to get one for these to run a few games off,if they go under £50 again.

Currently £47.41 from the seller I bought mine from. Go on, you know you want to...

[Bagnaj97]

After a change of plans the Kingspec has now gone in my laptop - still nothing truly critical on it, but reliability is more of a concern. As there's so little info on these drives online I've ordered the 90GB version (£19.74) and I plan to endurance test it - in theory the 180 and 360GB versions should be more durable because they've got more flash for wear levelling.

[Bagnaj97]

90GB Kingspec Q-90 has turned up, some quick benches before I endurance test it:

[Bagnaj97]

The 90GB Kingspec is still going strong after the best part of 82TB host writes, and that's almost all incompressible data from Anvil's storage tools endurance test. 0 reallocated sectors, reallocation event count or uncorrectable sector count. Anvil's MD5 test has also shown 0 errors. The average TLC erase count is now 977 (after conversion from hexadecimal). I also opened it up a while ago; It's got an Initio controller and what looks like micron nand with an attempt to obscure the logo. Here are the guts in all their glory: