WEBVTT

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this is a full-fledged NVMe SSD suitable

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for use in medium performance applications like in a notebook computer

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it's got a whopping one terabyte of capacity and comes from a company most

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of you won't have heard of called keoxia but at this size

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can it possibly be any good or should i be expecting performance

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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

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loads of nand dyes in order to reach capacities that would be considered i

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mean even back then enough for a boot drive that holds your operating system

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and some key performance sensitive applications this drive from 2010 uses a whopping

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look at this double-sided 16 chips each with just four gigs of

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capacity to reach its 120 gigs advertised capacity once you

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account for some spare area for wear leveling to improve its lifespan

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now you could actually get one terabyte

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ssds back then but it was very unusual the ocz colossus

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series was actually available in up to one terabyte capacities in 2010 but was

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one of the only ssds i'm aware of to have ever shipped in a three and a half

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inch form factor yes my friends it was the size of a hard

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drive had not one but two interlinks controllers each with their own separate

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dram caches and like this one it was

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covered front and back with nand flash packages except that it was a much

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bigger pcb massive shout out by the way to hot hardware for still having these

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images of a drive from a decade ago up on their site there's almost no other

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real evidence of these things ever existing in the wild probably because

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the one terabyte lt version would have set you back about four thousand dollars

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according to this article from zdnet and also my own memory because i was

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actually the ocz product manager at ncix back when they launched that thing

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that is a lot to spend on a high capacity

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drive that's going to be horribly bottlenecked by a SATA 2 interface

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so who the heck is kioskia and how do they

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figure into all this i'm glad you asked ocz was acquired by toshiba back in 2013

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toshiba memory corporation was spun off in 2018 and then became toshiba memory

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holdings corporation in 2019 which was renamed you guessed it

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so the bg4 is not just some weird aliexpress no name SSD this is actually

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their current generation business to business low power consumption solid

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state drive for small form factor systems and you might very well have one

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of these in your laptop if you've bought in the last little while without even

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knowing it unlike older ssds there's not actually a

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lot for us to disassemble here so i'm just gonna take off the sticker i wonder if it's

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like a thermal sticker wow it actually

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does appear to have some kind of a thermal backing on it or something that

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can't possibly help well there it is m.2 interface bare pcb

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and a single package mounted to one side

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now let's compare the bg4's anatomy to a couple more typical drives here's the

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interfaces okay no problem so far here's the controller on our typical drive so

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this takes the incoming data and spreads it across all the different nand

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packages so that none of them are worn out more than the others which improves

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drive endurance it also keeps track of where all the

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data is and spits it out back to you when you request it

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that is in here and then

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most modern high performance drives also have let's see if i can find it ah yes

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here we are a dram cache so the keoxia

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bg4 doesn't actually have one of those

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because keoxia is using a different approach to this typically for

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acceptable performance an SSD needs that high speed dram on board which actually

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gets wiped every time it loses power what it does is it holds a lookup table

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so that the controller which again is that one in the middle here

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knows where to find all the data that's been scattered around across the nan

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flash in order to make it last longer now you can live without it some

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controller architectures like notably this one or just cheaper ones don't use

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a dram cache but in most cases performance suffers sometimes to the

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point where a poorly designed d-roundless SSD can be slower than a

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mechanical hard drive at least that's the case when we're

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talking about more conventional SATA interface drives

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NVMe version 1.2 introduced a feature called the NVMe host memory buffer it

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actually lets an SSD that's attached to the system via pci express do some of

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that mapping in system memory now this

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would never work over SATA because the interface is just too slow but over pci

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express it seems like drives that use this feature can cache at least some of

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that mapping like at least for the most frequently accessed data in the system

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memory and make up some of that performance so that is what's going on

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here enough chit chat let's put our thermal sticker back on as if that's

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gonna do anything and go ahead and install this puppy interesting this

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thing is actually only three centimeters long so you look at it compared to the

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typical 80 centimeter form factor and it's like

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it's laughable um what's not funny is that i don't really

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have a way of installing it on the board directly i grabbed an ASUS hyper m.2x4 that also

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doesn't have the thing but i have one more option oh look at that

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the dim.2 so that's that little thing

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you can stick in what looks like a memory slot on some ASUS boards

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actually has the 30 millimeter mounting

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hole that's gonna make it so we can't really see it though okay new plan okay

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so we just need to kind of stick that there to anchor it

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during testing the kyocera actually did pretty respectably for a system

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integrator SSD we got sequential read speeds of around 2 gigabytes per second

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and writes well in excess of a Gigabyte with team write latencies that rarely

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pushed beyond one millisecond in our single threaded dual file copy and

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sequential performance test script where it stumbled was when we hit it with four

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simultaneous file copies where sequential speeds dipped dangerously

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close to hard drive territory after 10 minutes due to its lack of cooling and

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internal dram cache but it never gets bad

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obviously peak speeds are way better on our beefy pci express 4.0 Corsair mp600

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but it's worth noting that it too begins to stumble around the 10 minute mark

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under our four file copy load in some cases coming down as far as the

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kyokushin though it only ever broke a millisecond in right latency once those

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extra nand chips to the kyoces1 allow more channels to be active at once hence

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better performance but that's a pretty heavy workload and suffice it to say

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with the lighter work one of these will find in a daily driver

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you'd be hard pressed to find any difference whatsoever and that's what we

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saw in pcmark as well well that's pretty impressive definitely a darn sight

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better than the colossus from back in the day and what's really cool is that

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anantek actually measured some of the best power consumption that they had

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ever seen on this thing so given that its performance is

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fine better than SATA at least at a cost that manages to be cheaper than SATA and

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at a size that is small enough to make systems like

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this one even more compact in the future i'd say

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it's pretty sweet but also not terribly compelling for the

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vast majority of consumers for whom this is already

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really small and not difficult to fit in their computer which would probably

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explain why kyogre didn't bother making a retail version of the bg4 the only way

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to get one of these at this time is to buy a computer that happens to have one

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pre-installed in it by the manufacturer as for why i bothered making a video

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about it then honestly speaking i just thought it was

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really cool i mean come on it's an SSD the size of like my

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thumbnail you don't think that's cool

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you know what else is cool squarespace do you think making a website is hard

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doing wrong Linus media group and ltx expo websites were built quickly using

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help you out head to squarespace.com LTT

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and you can get 10 off today so thanks for watching if you guys are looking for

00:09:25.600 --> 00:09:30.880
another fun and interesting thing that's related what the heck could

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be related to this how about the other end of the performance spectrum numonix

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server with 24 NVMe drives

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yeah that's a good one