okay so today's video yeah it's a product that really makes no sense to me at least on the
surface this right here is i've actually got the product page up behind me this is come come on
come on come on get in here check this out check this out this is the i don't know highland star
micro electronica anyway we ordered it from usb.brando.com and this doodad right here adapts
as regular SATA interface with some controller from sage that i've never heard of to 10 micro sd
slots that's quality right there so yes my friends today we're going to make our own SSD today's
video is brought to you by tunnelbear the simple vpn try tunnelbear for free at tunnelbear.com
LTT we're going to have that linked below so step one is going to be some r-ing t effing m because
while
it does seem fairly straightforward in principle you take the 10 micro sd cards that kingston
graciously sent you because you're a famous youtuber and then you install them in all the
things i do want to make sure that we are doing it correctly so instructional note number the first
you can use one two four eight or oh my goodness 10 micro sd cards at one time it does not support
three five seven
or nine instructional step number the second insert the micro sd cards into the micro sd slots
one by one as the order shown on adapter where is chp0l i just see con tf1 tf6 tf2 i think that's
for trans flash why does this pcb say demo on it okay well we're just gonna we're just gonna go
where's here's tf1 let's do this thing am i doing this right you put it down and then you slide it
there we go so the idea here is that it runs all of your micro sd cards which aside from being a
much lower grade typically than the nan flash that you would find in an SSD are fundamentally the
same thing it runs them all in raid zero to make up for the fact that a typical micro sd card
will be capable of anywhere from 10 to 20 micro sd cards so i'm just going to make sure that i'm not
from, you know, 20 to maybe 80 to 90 megabytes a second reads and writes, whereas a typical SSD,
especially a SATA 3 one, can saturate a SATA 3 interface at around, you know, 550 or so megabytes
per second. One problem that I do foresee, though, is that there's more to life than sequential
performance when it comes to SSDs, and the controller dictates what the random performance
will be like. And, oh, that too ignores the other problem, which is that the flash on a typical
microSD card is not only slower, but also less resilient than the higher quality stuff on a
normal SSD. A problem that is compounded, this is all about the problems with this thing, hey,
compounded by the fact that you're running this whole thing in RAID 0. So one dead microSD card
means, poof, there goes your data. It's gone.
So there it is. For better or for worse, this is now a 1.2 terabyte RAID 0 microSD SATA SSD. I
don't know what it is. Let's plug it in. This is so dumb. It's like, cool, but it's like, why?
There it is. No way. 1.16 terabytes of usable space.
Let's call this drive letter K, because it's special. So I'm actually a bit of a loss now,
because I'm going to let you guys behind the curtain for a second here. While I was prepping
this video, I actually realized that this probably wasn't going to work, because I hadn't gone
through the instructions ahead of time, and I just noticed that it says right here, do not support
and these are quite clearly UHS-I cards. So I was expecting to like go on a field trip to Best Buy
and come back. But it's working. So let's let's test it, I guess. Okay, so if I told you we have
the world's stupidest SSD, special K drive here, how would you benchmark it? It's 10 microSD cards
on a PCB.
We could use Chris.
We could use CrystalDiskBrack, we could use Atto.
Yes. I'm coming into this with literally no expectations whatsoever. Actually, at 512 byte,
that's not even that bad, is it? This is at a queue depth of eight, though. So to be clear,
this is very unrealistic for a desktop workload. Okay, so there's a couple of takeaways here.
Number one is that our drive is indeed SATA 2. And number two is that the performance is actually
better than I thought.
Unexpected. But this is just sequential. This doesn't really tell us anything about how it would
perform in a real world workload. Let's hit it with CrystalDiskBrack just for lulz. Oh, wow.
We're still going to run the passmark test, I guess, but this is not looking good for random
performance. This is performing about like you'd expect from a bad SSD four or five years ago,
because there's a lot more to SSD performance than just
taking a...
A bunch of NAND flash and writing to and reading from it in a parallelized manner to get more speed
out of it. The controller intelligence has to be high in order to get better. Oh, wow. These random
numbers, these are awful.
Okay. So for our last trick, passmark disk thread test. So the average latency here doesn't really
tell us the whole story.
So here's the thing. The thing that just really impacts the performance of a drive
is the speed or speed of it. You can see, it's a little picture-ish, but you really feel the
slowness of a drive is when it spikes. That's what most modern SSDs are really trying to overcome,
is those spikes in latencies. That's when you click on something and you feel like your computer's
like . So we are seeing spikes up to almost half a second on this drive, with a lot of them
actually sitting here around a fifth of a second.
So...
While you could...
Run an OS on this thing,
So... while you could...
really wouldn't recommend it and to drive that point home I've actually
spent the last half an hour waiting for Windows to install off a USB drive and
it's still at 81% of getting files ready for installation this thing is kind of
painfully slow like to the point where I'm having a really hard time figuring
out what its purpose could possibly be because you might go oh well you know
maybe disposable data that you need to be faster than a hard drive but not as
fast as an SSD like a Steam game library but even then the cost is so
high to fill this thing with 64 gig or 128 gig micro SD cards like we did would
cost more than just buying a proper SSD like a Crucial MX 500 or a WD blue so
I'm not sure why it exists but it does and it's cool so there it is and you
know what else is cool Dollar Shave Club if you haven't for whatever reason sign
up for Dollar Shave Club then now is a better time than ever for just five
bucks they are offering their shave shower starter set it includes their
executive razor as well as three trial sized versions of some of their most
popular products their body wash their shave butter and their one wipe Charlie's
butt wipes after the starter set replacement cartridges are just a few
bucks a month so head over to dollarshaveclub.com slash Linus we're
gonna have that link below and join the club so thanks for watching guys if you
just like this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the maybe not that this
thing but maybe the SD cards and and that site actually where we got this has
lots of other cool random gadgets as well so you can check that out at the
link in the video description also link down there is our merch store which has
cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally
join