Reliability of cheap SSDs using only 1 NAND chip?

[burnttoastnice]

Late last year I bought myself a cheap TC-SUNBOW 60GB SSD to for my daily-driver laptop. So far it's been going fine, however at times there is some noticeable performance fluctuation during boot-up.

 

Sequential reads are around 320MB/s, and sequential writes around 87MB/s. So far it's managed 1.2TBW and has 99% health remaining. The low sequential writes had me wondering how many NAND chips are inside this thing, and well...

Spoiler

...yeah.

 

Inside is a legit-looking SM2246XT controller (Sata 3, No DRAM), and one no-brand 64GB 2-bit/cell MLC NAND flash chip.

 

Boot times are what matter the most to me - so I ran some boot time tests to get a better idea of noticeable performance difference. These were done on up-to-date installations of Windows 7 with manufacturer drivers, a browser and Office installed. Measured from 'Starting Windows' to desktop.

• Seagate ST500LM000 SSHD 500GB, 4GB Cache: 10 seconds
• Sandisk SSD 240GB: 11 seconds
• TC-SUNBOW SSD 60GB: 16 seconds
• Seagate ST750LM022 HDD: 52 seconds

 

I'm here wondering how long exactly might this SSD last, and are these cheap SSDs actually worth it for the performance difference?

[Jurrunio]

9 minutes ago, burnttoastnice said:

I'm here wondering how long exactly might this SSD last

it varies a lot, since there's not even a name brand for the flash module. It's not the quality of the chip that's bad, but the quality assurance and quality control. You have no idea whether this thing lasts 3 years or a month.

 

11 minutes ago, burnttoastnice said:

and are these cheap SSDs actually worth it for the performance difference?

If the alternative is a 500GB worth of space on a 5400RPM HDD, then of course it's worth the performance difference.

[Enderman]

If an SSD has two flash chips they're not running in some sort of raid, they are for more storage.

So the reliability is not really about how many chips there are, but the quality of each one.