so we're on aliexpress looking for bizarre components for an upcoming
project and we stumble across a series of really cheap ssds from a company
called king spec which kind of sounds like a knockoff of
kingston and this raised a couple of questions
for us one how can they be cheaper than
massive multinationals like samsung or
micron who enjoy the industry's best economies of scale
how would something like this perform and perhaps most importantly should
anyone trust what is probably the most
valuable aspect of their computer their data to a relatively
unknown player oh oh and one more question have you
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first things first the on paper specifications
which getting our hands on was actually not as
easy as you might think so the official page lists
neither the controller so that's effectively the brain of an SSD that
controls how data is managed on the nand flash nor the exact type of nand flash
that was used by this drive furthermore when we cross referenced
whatever data was out there in the wild often on third party sites we actually
found a ton of conflicting information
everything from different nand types mlc
versus tlc to wildly swinging sequential read and
write ranges in some cases we actually found conflicting information within the
same page now we were able to determine at least that the controller on our
particular unit was probably a d dramless model from maxiotec which is j
micron's SSD division that was spun off
into a separate entity and that it's probably an mk8115
but we decided to leave confirming it until
all the testing was complete just in case our autopsy found that the
patient was deceased due to the autopsy
okay so for those of us who are not quite up to speed on what makes an SSD
tick aside from the like you plug it
in and it makes the loading look faster
and why being d roundless is important here is a quick primer
when your operating system sends a write request to an SSD it actually assumes
even though it's 2018 that it is talking to a hard drive and sends data in
logical block address or lba form now
ssds they don't do lba instead storing data
in blocks which each contain four kilobyte pages
so that's where the flash translation layer
inside the SSD comes in it converts lba requests into actual
block and page addresses acting as sort of a table of contents
what's more each nand cell has a finite
number of times that it can be overwritten so there needs to be logic
inside the SSD that takes care to spread
out the wear evenly this is a process known as wear leveling
further complicating this process though an individual page cannot be erased from
a block so to remove part of the data
from one block the whole block has to be moved over to a second one
minus the pages containing parts of the file that are marked for deletion once
that's done the first block can be marked as safe to overwrite now this
consolidation or moving around is known as garbage collection and ssds have at
least seven percent of their true capacity hidden sometimes more in order
to help shuffle data around this is otherwise known as over provisioning
now as you can imagine as an SSD gets more filled up with data this garbage
collection process gets more difficult because the fewer spare blocks you have
the harder it is to organize the ones that remain
especially during heavy use when it has
to perform this shuffling on the fly
this is where not having a dram cash can hurt
you remember that table of contents we talked about
ideally that gets stored on the cash
so then without a fast way to look up
where what goes writing data to a d roundless
SSD ends up being kind of like going to the mall without a directory
then imagine you're in a hurry like you're doing random writes of small
files all over the drive which actually happens a lot during regular usage
or or does it so let's look at some performance here
oh oh lordy oh oh wow oh oh the humanity
sorry okay enough of that let's actually look a little closer at those numbers
in sequential reads and writes from a clean state everything here actually
looks fine but the same can be said of an sd card
and when we ran Windows on one of those recently the results were
well less than ideal but where our king's back SSD falls flat
on its face is where small size transfers come in so we're talking being
beat by an order of two and a half times in some cases and then embarrassingly
enough this model we're comparing it to right here is also a cashless model this
time from Corsair so it seems to be a mix of the who knows what nand and the
cheap ass controller along with an unexceptional firmware and that is with
the drives empty and trimmed this situation can only get worse as the
drive fills up game level load times could be seen as a
redeeming quality those are fine
but honestly by this stage of our testing they just aren't enough for king
spec to be getting any kind of recommendation for this drive especially
given the mixed amazon reviews that are either basically yay works great or
died quickly no response from the rma team with someone even going as far as
to set up a complaints page about
kingspec the final nail in the coffin is the
price so our no name SSD is cheap sure
at the time we ordered it it was the cheapest 512 gig that we could find
but cheap is not the same thing as good
value so given that something like a samsung 860 evo can be had for
complete with five year warranty by the way about ten dollars more then i guess
the conclusion is this i recommend the kingsback p3512
i strongly recommend it as a gift
for someone you don't like
speaking of things i recommend as a gift although in this case for someone you really like
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to be clear we're not really recommending this one either we're just saying this one is really bad