Hey guys. I'm sure you've seen a couple of these floating around already but I wanted to make my own edit with Funky Sundays. Let me know what you think
It has to due with some laws in canada so that they can claim the prize was awarded for a test of skill, not just as a random prize. Something about taxes or some other bull crap that no one but canadians care about. From what I hear, it's pretty standard fare up there for things like this.
The "Canadian Competition Act" bans games of chance outside of specific things (like the lottery). So people ask a question and call it a "test of skill" instead of a game of chance.
Following another post, I've decided to buy a bunch of lesser brand SSDs to test for myself. Note my uses are niche, so the value proposition wont apply to everyone. Basically I have lots of crunchers which have their own disk for OS. Previously I just bought whatever was cheapest at the time from a known brand, usually Sandisk or Kingston at the lower price end. They don't need much more space than that needed for Windows and a bit of breathing space, so 60GB+ is decent and plentiful, at a comparable price-per-GB compared to the bigger size branded drives, but the branded ones go up in cost for smaller capacities.
After much hunting on ebay I've decided to order 4 low cost 60-64GB drives to try out.
There were some others with lower stated write speeds so I decided against them. I have a bunch of recent Kingston and Sandisk SSDs I could compare against, as well as older OCZ and Intel models.
Benchmarks used were CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD. After reviewing the results, I decided to only show 3 of the 4 tests from CDM as representative of general performance. I would caution I only ran the benchmark once for each unless there was something obviously wrong with the results. Run to run variation may move the positions around a bit but not in a significant way. The Samsung PM951 drive gave low random write performance initially, and this moved up to expected speeds once I disabled write cache flushing in Windows for that drive. This setting didn't seem to make any difference for other drives in a quick look.
I've colour coded a bit to make it easier to see how classes of product compare. In yellow, we have PCIe connected SSDs. These are the only ones capable of breaking the SATA interface barrier. In blue are assorted SATA branded SSDs. In green are the small capacity lesser brand SSDs. And in red are the spinning hard disks. On that note, the Toshiba 3TB is a 3.5" 7200 rpm drive. The Seagate Momentus XT is a SSHD with a flash cache of some GB but otherwise is just a hard disk. The two Hitachi hard disks are 2.5" laptop drives. You can guess which is 5400 or 7200 rpm from the model name.
This is the best case read speed, and no surprise the PCIe drives blow the others away. The lesser brand drives are at the lower end of the SATA SSDs, but this may be more due to the small capacity. The hard disks take up the rear.
For sequential writes, things shake up a bit. The Samsung PM951 drops down the ranks, possibly a combination of it using TLC and relatively small capacity. The Toshiba 3TB HD holds strong, and the lesser brand SSDs even drop below the hard disks. So if you have a lot of sequential writes, hard disks can still be competitive especially if you need the capacity also.
The queued random reads separates the SSDs from the HDs quite clearly. While we have a big spread amongst the SSD models here, even the slowest one is significantly faster than any of the hard disks.
The situation is similar for queued random writes.
Random reads again perform similarly to before, just slower overall.
And similar again for random writes, with the interesting observation the lesser brand small SSDs manage to outpace bigger Samsung PM871 and Sandisk Plus SSDs here.
Overall, I never expected these to be miracle performers, and they are not. What they are, is good enough performance for general tasks, and still far faster than hard disks in most situations. Due to their small capacity, if you did have a large quantity of sequential operations a hard disk would be a more interesting option anyway.
Opening it up, we see a short board, with 4 flash devices and controller on one side. Peeling off the sticker reveals the SM2246XT. I'm not familiar with the logo on the flash. Text on the flash is:
PFC54
-10AR
1552
Separately in the corner is: VCBK or VCCC depending on the chip.
The reverse side shows 4 unused positions, allowing for a doubling of capacity if they were also used.
The Hypertec didn't come in any packaging. The drive seems a bit different, since the company appears to be a UK one, and manufactured in Mexico. This isn't your typical drive from China.
On this side we only see the controller chip under a thermal pad. Peeling away the pad reveals a SandForce SF-2241. There are 8 unused flash positions.
On the other side we find another 8 flash positions, with 4 of them used. There is no logo on the chips, only the text "10-2182-01-MTX-1AP".
The Kingfast comes in a cardboard box.
Opening it up we see the drive held inside more cardboard.
Internally we see a small board. It is interesting this drive reports under AIDA64 as a 1.8" drive, so it could be a rehoused part. There is the SM2246XT controller, and a single flash device fitted to one of 4 positions.
In the middle of the chip is marked:
6EC27
NW686
PF579 S8
The white block has a faint Micron logo in it.
To the side of there are another two lines of marking overlapping each other:
H641604
T56H
On the underside, there isn't anything of note.
The Hectron comes in a package with thin card outer sleeve.
Inside that outer sleeve is a card covered foam holder. Note the drive was supplied in an anti-static bag, which is not shown here as I had unpacked it earlier.
On this side of the board we see the SM2246XT once again. There are 8 flash positions of which 4 are filled.
The chips have GLOWAY on the top, and H27QDG8D2B8R which a search indirectly comes back with Hynix 16nm MLC. Under that is: B1B 1616. Gloway seems to be a manufacturer of SSD products also.
The other side of the board has 8 more unused positions for more flash.
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Andyni reacted to robin.vorde in Post Linus Memes Here! << -Original thread has returned
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