WEBVTT

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so we're on aliexpress looking for bizarre components for an upcoming

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project and we stumble across a series of really cheap ssds from a company

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called king spec which kind of sounds like a knockoff of

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kingston and this raised a couple of questions

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for us one how can they be cheaper than

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massive multinationals like samsung or

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micron who enjoy the industry's best economies of scale

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how would something like this perform and perhaps most importantly should

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anyone trust what is probably the most

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valuable aspect of their computer their data to a relatively

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unknown player oh oh and one more question have you

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first things first the on paper specifications

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which getting our hands on was actually not as

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easy as you might think so the official page lists

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neither the controller so that's effectively the brain of an SSD that

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controls how data is managed on the nand flash nor the exact type of nand flash

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that was used by this drive furthermore when we cross referenced

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whatever data was out there in the wild often on third party sites we actually

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found a ton of conflicting information

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everything from different nand types mlc

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versus tlc to wildly swinging sequential read and

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write ranges in some cases we actually found conflicting information within the

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same page now we were able to determine at least that the controller on our

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particular unit was probably a d dramless model from maxiotec which is j

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micron's SSD division that was spun off

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into a separate entity and that it's probably an mk8115

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but we decided to leave confirming it until

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all the testing was complete just in case our autopsy found that the

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patient was deceased due to the autopsy

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okay so for those of us who are not quite up to speed on what makes an SSD

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tick aside from the like you plug it

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in and it makes the loading look faster

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and why being d roundless is important here is a quick primer

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when your operating system sends a write request to an SSD it actually assumes

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even though it's 2018 that it is talking to a hard drive and sends data in

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logical block address or lba form now

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ssds they don't do lba instead storing data

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in blocks which each contain four kilobyte pages

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so that's where the flash translation layer

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inside the SSD comes in it converts lba requests into actual

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block and page addresses acting as sort of a table of contents

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what's more each nand cell has a finite

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number of times that it can be overwritten so there needs to be logic

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inside the SSD that takes care to spread

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out the wear evenly this is a process known as wear leveling

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further complicating this process though an individual page cannot be erased from

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a block so to remove part of the data

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from one block the whole block has to be moved over to a second one

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minus the pages containing parts of the file that are marked for deletion once

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that's done the first block can be marked as safe to overwrite now this

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consolidation or moving around is known as garbage collection and ssds have at

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least seven percent of their true capacity hidden sometimes more in order

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to help shuffle data around this is otherwise known as over provisioning

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now as you can imagine as an SSD gets more filled up with data this garbage

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collection process gets more difficult because the fewer spare blocks you have

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the harder it is to organize the ones that remain

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especially during heavy use when it has

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to perform this shuffling on the fly

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this is where not having a dram cash can hurt

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you remember that table of contents we talked about

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ideally that gets stored on the cash

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so then without a fast way to look up

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where what goes writing data to a d roundless

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SSD ends up being kind of like going to the mall without a directory

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then imagine you're in a hurry like you're doing random writes of small

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files all over the drive which actually happens a lot during regular usage

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or or does it so let's look at some performance here

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oh oh lordy oh oh wow oh oh the humanity

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sorry okay enough of that let's actually look a little closer at those numbers

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in sequential reads and writes from a clean state everything here actually

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looks fine but the same can be said of an sd card

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and when we ran Windows on one of those recently the results were

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well less than ideal but where our king's back SSD falls flat

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on its face is where small size transfers come in so we're talking being

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beat by an order of two and a half times in some cases and then embarrassingly

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enough this model we're comparing it to right here is also a cashless model this

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time from Corsair so it seems to be a mix of the who knows what nand and the

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cheap ass controller along with an unexceptional firmware and that is with

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the drives empty and trimmed this situation can only get worse as the

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drive fills up game level load times could be seen as a

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redeeming quality those are fine

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but honestly by this stage of our testing they just aren't enough for king

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spec to be getting any kind of recommendation for this drive especially

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given the mixed amazon reviews that are either basically yay works great or

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died quickly no response from the rma team with someone even going as far as

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to set up a complaints page about

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kingspec the final nail in the coffin is the

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price so our no name SSD is cheap sure

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at the time we ordered it it was the cheapest 512 gig that we could find

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but cheap is not the same thing as good

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value so given that something like a samsung 860 evo can be had for

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complete with five year warranty by the way about ten dollars more then i guess

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the conclusion is this i recommend the kingsback p3512

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i strongly recommend it as a gift

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for someone you don't like

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speaking of things i recommend as a gift although in this case for someone you really like

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mass drops sennheiser hd 6xx headphones

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this is one of massdrop's all-time best sellers and why

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wouldn't it be over 40 000 of their members have picked these things up to

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date and people continue to want them it uses the legendary hd 650 drivers as a

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base to deliver a balanced mid-range and natural sounding base it's got a

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detachable six foot cable instead of the 10-foot cable on the original this is

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based on the community's feedback and it comes with support from sennheiser so

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check out the link below to join the drop today

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so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that

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button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out

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where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also

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down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like

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this one and our community forum which you should definitely join

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to be clear we're not really recommending this one either we're just saying this one is really bad