Rather than start a new topic on this, I thought I'd share some info I have on the topic as people will hit the thread.
I've had two KingDian M.2 SSD's. Not for $20 off but at around half price.
The first one my Chuwi lapbook Air refused because it claimed the controller was not supported. The eBay seller refused to refund but did give me about 85% of my money back. The SSD works in a USB 3.0 M.2 caddy so that's fine. It does not get a lot of use and only carries transient data.
The second one worked. I got it from Amazon and I checked out the supplier. Amazon returns are a lot better than eBay, however, so I paid the extra £5. The drive, identical to the first one, was accepted by the Chuwi and it worked perfectly. However it ran hot. Very hot. I was not too bothered because my Chuwi is simply a portable device which I don't create content on, it accesses other content which is cloud or NAS/sever based.
Yesterday the SSD failed. About a year after I bought it. Today I put it under a very strong magnifying glass and had a good look at it with the label off. It has a genuine SanDisk chip on it, clearly new and not re-used. A much more detailed inspection shows that this is a part which failed QC and has been "touched up" by hand. Soldering quality is generally poor for the entire board, clearly it was a failed batch through the solder bath.
Further inspection shows what failed. There is a chip on the back (don't ask me it has no markings and I'm not an electroics engineer), but the chip has crumbled and shows signs of overheating from the inside.
As has been said above. You get what you pay for. I will replace it with a mainstream drive now that they have reached reasonable price levels and I have some experience with the Chuwi itself and whether I actually want to keep it.
The drive did the job I asked of it. Namely to give me time to experience the machine and see if it would do what I required or whether I'd need to get something more powerful than the Atom chip, without driving my expense to the levels where I felt I would have to keep it to get my money's worth.
However, as expected, the lifetime of the SSD was short.
I wouldn't sell anyone a machine with these SSD's in them. I value my reputation and this won't enhance it.
