Everyone knows that compared to a hard drive, an SSD is a great way to speed up
your system. But what everyone doesn't know is that unless your SSD has a DRAM
cache built into it, like this one for
example, it can actually end up being slower than a mechanical hard disk. So
that's why in the past we've always avoided those $20 SSDs
until now. Meet the Fatty Dove Racing 120 gig SSD.
We purchased this sucker for 20 bucks. So, who's the sucker? This sucker or
this sucker?
I know it shouldn't matter, but whenever I see really terrible branding, like to
the point where you'd have had to be a child or an idiot to think that it makes
any sense, it really does decrease my
confidence in the finished product. You know, why is there an overweight bird on
the box for this package? What is it about this that screams racing? I don't
know. You don't know. Nobody knows. We're all just guessing. So, let's talk
through the specs here. This is a 2 and a half inch drive with a an apparent
128 mgby of DRAM cache. This is from the
Amazon listing. Um, the verbiage though is lifted straight from the Wikipedia
entry for other solid state drives. So, it says DRAM based and cash on buffer.
But the thing is, the only other SSDs that we've seen at this price point are
DRAMless, used, or renewed. And as far
as I can tell, this thing is totally brand new in box. So,
we also have this that came in the package. Oh, service policy. Thank you for
purchase of our items. We're so glad that you selected us in our products. We
offer a 5-year limited warranty. Love you, Dave. We got our SATA cable. That
is actually a pretty good bonus. Most drives don't include a SATA cable
anymore. So, we need our data and our
power. And is this just going to boot right up for me, Anthony? Uh, if you press the power button. Yeah.
Well, yeah. Minor details. Uh, you don't need to hit F8.
Wait, is this just a sticker? Sure is. So, if the sticker is on it, you get
plus 2 years of warranty. I don't know. Sudden power off recovery. That to me
indicates that it would have a capacitor on it like a like an enterprise SSD.
That's what it sounds like. It can't possibly have that. Also, I
love this sentence right here. Thank you for selecting us. Good luck. So, first
test is what? Just initializing it. Yeah, we need to initialize it.
New simple volume. Well, the capacity is as advertised. Now, there's some more
problems here. This says serial ATA revision 2.6, six, but it also says it's
SATA 6 Gbit per second. And it said that on the drive as well.
Yeah. So, apparently it doesn't even support trim and is SATA 2 according well
depending on which spec you believe. Well, we'll know soon enough because
Crystal Disc Mark will tell us exactly what kind of sequential speeds we can
expect from this thing. You know, in some ways this like rando cheap hardware
is far more interesting than the stuff from manufacturers that are reputable
enough that you can trust what they say. Yeah, you never know what you're going to get.
Look at that. So, it's SATA 3 6 GB per second even though there's information
right on the box that would indicate that it's not
what they put a dove on their packaging. So, how how can we rely on them to know
exactly what's in the box if they clearly had no idea what they were doing on the outside of it? Out of the gate,
I'm actually kind of impressed. I mean, saturating the SATA 3 6 gig per second
interface has not been a feat for years and years at this point. But the thing
is, this is only a 120 gig SSD. So,
what's weird about that is that you know how higher capacities of a given SSD
tend to be rated for more performance. The reason for that is that to get those
higher capacities, in some cases, they'll put more nan flash chips onto
the PCB, which means that you get to take advantage of more parallelization
as you're writing to the flash and reading from it, boosting your
performance. Well, it's been years since
120 gig SSDs have made any sense to make
because the capacities of the individual nan flash chips have become so high that
in order to even build a 120 gig SSD, you'd only need like one chip on there
and the performance would absolutely suck unless it's fine.
Okay, so the enigma deepens then. What
did you have in mind for us next, Anthony? Uh, well, we could do the file copy
test, but um I did create some tests
specifically for this in Linux. Okay, so I should restart. Yep.
All right. So, okay, hit me. Pop open two terminals and we'll run
some uh scripts that I made. Sudo slash
disc test. All right. So, uh that one then
that is the one 111 gig SSD. Yeah, it does a security
erase first and now it's doing continuous looping of 1 GB right and
then 1 GB read. Okay. And then it tells us what the latency is
after a thousand writes of average. Oh, that took a lot longer already. Oh,
it's going up. Oh boy. We went from 2.3 seconds to 7 seconds
already. The reads are still pretty consistent, but the rights have
skyrocketed. This is TLC. Okay, that's fair. All right.
So, the other one, um, do sudo file copy
off. What? I swear to God, the way that
WhatsApp sends you constant notifications that you're logged out
P space mount and hit enter. That all
looks correct. And that'll show us then over here what our sequential read and
writes look like and as well as especially the right latency.
Got it. So that'll tell us how effective that DRAM cache is,
as well as how effective the NAND is at being erased.
This is interesting. So the read test is still taking about the same amount of
time it was at the start, but we're getting spikes in the right test where
it's jumping up to over 15 seconds. We
just finished our first run of the sequential file copy test and it's
getting warm now. And this is interesting. The read test is no longer
finishing consistently in just two seconds. It's actually drawn almost
level with the right test which has gone down.
The right latency though has gone up pretty significantly. Quintupal or as much as 8x. It's all
over the place. Okay. Does it have a DRM
cap? No, don't tell me. We'll find out after. So now what?
Well, now we can graph those results, but we could also throw on one of our
DRMless SSDs. Oh, let's see. See if that uh that makes a difference.
Okay. Uh so reboot. Do you want to look at that output
first? Yeah. You want to look at the output first? Ah ltar.com. Oh, thank you. Did you
really build that into this benchmark? I built many things into the benchmark
that you have not seen yet.
That moment when your program is like 90% Easter eggs, 10% copying files back
and forth. Dear lord. Oh my god, Anthony.
What? How do I shut it down? Same way you just go to go to leave
leave. Why is it called leave? I mean that's almost as stupid as Windows being
start to turn it off. So just the same commands again.
Same commands again. So we'll start with the A data drive. That is
I want to say similar and then I can start this one. Yeah.
Okay. Let's see what happens. Now this product page is just going to be lies,
right? Do you want to look at it? I mean we've got some time. I'm pretty sure most of
this is lifted either from Wikipedia or like reviews of other unrelated SSDs.
Single level cell cache technology. I don't think so.
Uh definitely not. SLC hasn't been around even in the enterprise for many
years. There's even conflicting information here. It takes 10 seconds
from the start to the desktop. Fatty Dub 240 gig solidstate drive starts up in
about 15 seconds. They're this far away
from each other. Optical storage read
speed. What? What are you even talking about? Do we
have a result here? No, not just yet. But I not quite yet, but I think sure this is
a DRAMless SSD. Wait,
it actually might not be. This a data is
doing even worse. Wait, no. Better in
latency for the most part, but the actual test completion times are much
worse. That actually would make some sense if the Fatty Dove only has a
couple of chips in it.
Thankfully, Fatty Dove is more resistant
to shock and vibrations. Can fly, but like not quite fly. It just sort of like
falls slowly, you know? I think it's just like a chicken. Yeah. Yeah, chickens can do that. Have
you ever thrown a chicken? No. Fun fact, I actually had a pet
chicken when I was a kid. Me, too. The chicken was the one that all the other chickens picked on. Yeah. So, we
took the chicken away and we raised it and it became nice and big. And then one
day we had to give it back for reasons. Did your parents make you eat it though?
No, it was cuz that's what happened with my pet goat. Oh, run three finished. Wow.
250 seconds by the last run here. This
one got absolutely creamed. All right, then.
Okay, point to Fatty Dub, I guess. Control. Well, I mean,
for throughput. Yeah, beating the worst is not exactly an achievement. So, round
two. Uh, this one right here. Should I just start ripping this thing open?
Do you want to avoid that warranty? Oh, yeah. Open. Wow, that sticker. Stop.
You're done. Oh, and it's bent.
Yep. You bent your fatty dove. Yeah. Wow. That is That is not a lot of
PCB. Tell me something, Anthony. Are you finding this out for the first time or
did you have one of these open already? I did not have one of these open already. I should have gotten one and
opened one, but this is actually very fascinating to me right now.
Now, I have seen SSDs that have taken a similar approach with a full size 2 and
1/2 in enclosure. And I've actually seen ones that are like as small as just
right here. Okay. So, based on looking at the back
of the PCB, I'd say that's our controller right there. And I'm guessing
no DRAM cache cuz it looks like there's just one chip right there.
It does have a DRAM cache. It's right
here. No way. So that seems to be a
Silicon Motion controller. We're going to have to check this Samsung part
number to find out if the 128meg cache is correct. And then as we discussed,
there is in fact only a single nan flash
chip on this PCB. But based on how far
flash has come in the last few years, I guess you can get adequate enough
performance for a SATA SSD out of just a
single chip, which I guess kind of makes sense cuz you know a max capacity NVMe
drive is only going to have four chips on it with a lot of the high performance
ones having just two. So SATA is like a
fraction of that speed. Wow, I'm
impressed. Okay, let's find out how much cache it actually has, though. Oh, this
benchmark is done and the Micron SSD is
definitely better, but not necessarily because it has a DRM cache. Probably
just cuz it's got better engineered firmware and a better controller. Okay, I want to I want to check these part
numbers now. I think that's an E D RAM chip. DDR3 SD RAM 1 GB. Okay, so 128
megs. Surprisingly then, as broken as the packaging and product page were, the
main controversial element of this thing, whether or not it had a DRAM
cache, ended up being true. Uh although
with that said, the power loss protection uh did not end up being
present. There's no bank of capacitors here that looks anything like that. So
that that is clearly not accurate. Why
why would they say that? Is it to do with the fact that compared to a hard
drive, you don't have to worry about if you lose power, the head parking?
Oh, or it could be that they mean that
compared to something like just a D a
RAM drive, the data is held persistently,
right? Right. Maybe it's it's like volatile.
Yeah. Non nonvolatile storage. I don't know. I don't know what they were going
after there. But for 20 bucks, actually
not bad. for longevity, right? But
yeah, can't can't speak to that. But hey, 5year warranty, right? So, thanks
for watching, guys. If you enjoyed this little adventure in exploring weird
cheap hardware off of AliExpress, then maybe check out uh our oh our show and
tell where everyone bought the weirdest hardware they could possibly find and
then see who had seed saw, who had whatever. It was weird. Go check it out.
Thanks Bluff.