this is a full-fledged NVMe SSD suitable
for use in medium performance applications like in a notebook computer
it's got a whopping one terabyte of capacity and comes from a company most
of you won't have heard of called keoxia 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
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backbone ssds started to really take off for consumers it took
loads of nand dyes 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
look at this double-sided 16 chips each with just four 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
ssds 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 interlinks controllers each with their own separate
dram 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 to 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 kioskia and how do they
figure into all this i'm glad you asked ocz 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
so the bg4 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've bought 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 i 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 well there it is m.2 interface bare pcb
and a single package mounted to one side
now let's compare the bg4's anatomy to a couple more typical drives here's the
interfaces okay no problem 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 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 ah yes
here we are a dram cache so the keoxia
bg4 doesn't actually have one of those
because keoxia is using a different approach to this typically for
acceptable performance an SSD needs that high speed dram on board which actually
gets wiped every time it loses power what it does is it holds a lookup table
so that the controller which again is that one in the middle here
knows where to find all the data that's been scattered around across the nan
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 dram cache but in most cases performance suffers sometimes to the
point where a poorly designed d-roundless SSD can be slower than a
mechanical hard drive at least that's the case when we're
talking about more conventional SATA interface drives
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 mapping 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 chit chat 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 three centimeters long so you look at it compared to the
typical 80 centimeter form factor and it's like
it's laughable um 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.2x4 that also
doesn't have the thing but i have one more option oh look at that
the dim.2 so that's that little thing
you can stick in what looks like a memory slot on some ASUS boards
actually has the 30 millimeter mounting
hole that's gonna make it so we can't really see it though okay new plan okay
so we just need to kind of stick that there to anchor it
during testing the kyocera 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 team write latencies that rarely
pushed beyond one millisecond in our single threaded dual file copy and
sequential performance test script where it stumbled was when 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 dram cache but it never gets bad
obviously peak speeds are way better on our beefy pci express 4.0 Corsair mp600
but it's worth noting that it too begins to stumble around the 10 minute mark
under our four file copy load in some cases coming down as far as the
kyokushin though it only ever broke a millisecond in right latency once those
extra nand chips to the kyoces1 allow more channels to be active at once hence
better performance but that's a pretty heavy workload and suffice it to say
with the lighter work one of these will find in a daily driver
you'd be hard pressed to find any difference whatsoever and that's what we
saw in pcmark as well 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
anantek actually measured some of the best power consumption that they had
ever seen on this thing so given that its 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 kyogre didn't bother making a retail version of the bg4 the only way
to get one of these at 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
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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 numonix
server with 24 NVMe drives
yeah that's a good one